This has been seen everywhere. Just google "Delta surge <country>."

I agree. The reasons for the situation in Alberta are

1) Delta variant being more dangerous that the previous ones, causing a higher number of infections ending up in hospitals and ICUs. I shudder at the though of what would have happened if we got a delta wave before vaccination. We are lucky we got it after vaccinating 70% of the population. India and Iran (and I am sure some other countries) got their delta wave before being able to vaccinate a large enough percentage of people and the result was a human tragedy.

2) During the previous waves, when the number of infections went up, the government imposed harder restrictions to avoid this very eventuality. During this wave, government thought the vaccines meant hospitalization and ICU would be fully disconnected from case numbers, so did not impose restrictions until it was too late and the ICUs were already on the verge of bursting. Restrictions such as mask mandates and capacity limits which were present in previous waves were not imposed until two weeks ago for this wave.

There doesn't seem to be much evidence to suggest Delta produces all that much more severe disease.[1] The CDC says "it might be". Much more infectious, yes, but not more deadlier or at least not so much deadlier as to explain the Alberta numbers (especially comparing a population that is 70% vaccinated now versus 5% in the last wave).

And again, we aren't seeing the same impact outside of Alberta. In the US, which has a lower overall vaccination rate, the death rate is actually lower than prior waves.

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...

US's death and ICU rates are higher than Alberta though, which can be explained by the difference in vaccination rates. So Alberta's current wave is not out of ordinary.

Rate of death (per 100k population) over the past 7 days:

Alberta: 2.3

United States: 3.01

Number of COVID-19 patients in ICU per million population:

Alberta: 268 / 4.421 = 60.6

United States: 62.5

https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths...

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-icu-patients-per-mi...

This was published recently. There is at least some evidence that the Delta variant is more deadly.

https://globalnews.ca/news/8244271/delta-variant-covid-19-st...