Premier Scott Moe speaks to media after a tour of the COVID-19 mass immunization clinic and drive-thru vaccination space at the International Trade Centre in Regina on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021.Michael Bell/The Canadian Press
Saskatchewan’s top doctor says the presence of more contagious variants makes testing even more important to stem the spread of COVID-19.
Dr. Saqib Shahab says the province needs to keep its daily cases low and people must follow public-health advice to try to prevent more infectious variants from taking over.
“We need to use testing more, even more now, because of the variants of concern,” he said during a briefing Thursday.
The province says thousands of rapid-testing kits from Ottawa will be deployed into long-term care homes, schools, detox facilities, shelters, as well as to first responders.
The province is also looking to hire a third-party provider to help any groups that may be unable to use the kits themselves.
Shahab says some people have delayed getting tested and gone to work with symptoms, which has led to outbreaks. Testing will help the province’s caseload decrease because tests can help break chains of transmission, he said.
Cory Neudorf, a public health and epidemiology professor at the University of Saskatchewan, said provinces are at a critical point in the pandemic.
He said vaccine rollouts for the most vulnerable are in their early days and the risk is that variants could drive up spread before many older residents are immunized.
Two weeks ago, the Saskatchewan Health Authority gave an update to physicians that included a discussion on community spread with some point-in-time modelling.
A senior medical which warned that confirmed cases in the province could double to 50,000 by mid-April, if certain indicators didn’t change, such as the reproductive figure for how many people one person with COVID-19 infects.
The Saskatchewan Health Authority said Thursday that calculation was based on an earlier case count. It said as of Feb. 20, the reproductive figure has been below one. That means case growth is less than it was when the town hall estimate was given.
“It’s a slightly less possibility than it was a few weeks ago, but it’s still possible that we would be seeing a resurgence by mid-April. Whether or not it gets to 50,000 cases, I don’t know,” Neudorf said.
Neudorf does point out that caseloads have begun to stabilize and drop in the past few weeks in parts of the province, including around Saskatoon and in the south.
The province on Thursday reported 211 new infections after only 56 on Wednesday – the lowest count in months. The total number of confirmed cases since the pandemic took hold last March sits at slightly over 28,000.
Shahab said it’s a positive sign that pressure on the health system has dropped. There were 165 people in hospital and 18 in intensive care Thursday.
But Saskatchewan, with a population of 1.1 million, still reports having the highest rate of active cases per capita in Canada. It also has two cases of the variant first identified in the United Kingdom with no known links to travel.
Shahab has said this is the third week in some time in which seven-day averages of new daily cases are below 200. He also said the province’s test positivity rate is about seven per cent, down from 10.
Still, health officials say more testing is needed because it’s higher than five per cent.