Alberta's 2021 Injury and Fatality Report

Alberta released some injury-related reports in April. Here are the highlights from the 2021 Workplace Injury, Illness and Fatality Statistics report:

• A 12% increase in accepted injury claims (exclusive of COVID claims). 
• Youth (15-24) continue to have the highest adjusted disabling claim rate (but the lowest fatality rate (likely influenced by the importance in long-latency occupational diseases to overall fatality rates).
•  There were 135 fatalities accepted by the WCB, including 25 from COVID.

COVID-related claims accepted by the WCB totalled 6814 injuries and 25 deaths. The rules around compensability mean this is a significant undercounting of work-related COVID.

Table 3 (reproduced below) shows a pretty good summary. There was a significant drop in non-COVID injuries in 2020, which likely reflects the drop in employment during COVID (plus the crash in oil prices).

 


It is not clear to me what effect changes in the WCB legislation had on these numbers (I’d need to think a bit more about when the effect of those changes would start to show up).

Controlling for the size of the workforce (the rate per 100 person years worked) we see a drop in the rate of injury. As employment numbers and oil prices bounce back up in 2021, we see numbers and rates start to increase.

-- Bob Barnetson