Five additional deaths have taken place in the province of Alberta, that are related to COVID-19.

Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Chief Medical Officer of Health gave an update on COVID-19 statistics on Monday afternoon and also addressed common questions about the virus.

There are now more than 1090 active cases in the province.

“COVID continues to be with us and we cannot turn our backs on this virus,” she said.

She spoke about updates to the online map of COVID-19 cases numbers.

She explained that the areas on the map can be viewed by the municipality, or Local Geographic Areas (LGA).

She noted that LGAs follow an internal mapping system used by Alberta Health Services.

“This naming convention has been in place for some time, however; LGA names were not created with a realtime map and a pandemic in mind. This has lead to some confusion about the area names,” she said.

“When you are looking at the LGA map, the numbers represented include surrounding area numbers, not just the individual town.” She explained that officials are reviewing the map and renaming any affected areas to make it clear these are regional data and the cases are not all in one community.

She also addressed why it takes so long to get test results. She revealed the province is trying to speed up the testing process in the coming weeks.

In terms of back to school this fall, Hinshaw says the best preparation is talking through scenarios and making a plan on how to deal with them when kids go back to school.

She recommended that families restrict their cohorts for the first few weeks once kids go to school.

“Let's all do our best to keep each other and ourselves safe,” she said.

She reminded people to continue their personal hygiene, wear a mask, social distance, isolate if you get sick, and get tested.