I would agree that the system issued a daily report, and that the chief public health officer of Canada reacted to that report and alerted her provincial counterparts, but the system did not issue an alert, which for all intents and purposes, looking at the criteria in the past, should have been done.
I would equate it to an alert from your smoke detector. When you're in your home, you want your smoke detector to go off to tell you to stop, come and take a look, investigate what's going on and see if you need to react. If you're standing outside your home and it's already on fire, I don't think you really care if your smoke detector is going off.
I would use it that way. An alert is meant to signal that you should stop and investigate and do something.