The province reported the all time daily high number of COVID-19 cases on Saturday with 308 cases reported.
The North Central, which includes Prince Albert, reported 30 new cases.
Saskatchewan’s Chief Medical Health Officer Dr. Saqib Shahab is reminding residents of Saskatchewan to get back to the basics.
“Today’s record high case numbers are a reminder that the spread of COVID-19 in Saskatchewan is higher now than it has even been throughout Saskatchewan including urban, rural, Northern and First Nations areas and that we all need to redouble our efforts to protect ourselves and others,” Shahab said.
“Wear a mask, limit your number of personal contacts, limit your number of visitors from outside your household, don’t leave home if you are feeling sick, and make sure you’re always physically distancing and washing your hands often. We all need to do our part to limit the spread.”
According to the province today’s high number of reported cases is due in part to the snowstorm early in the week, which resulted in fewer people going for testing, and some delays in getting samples from remote locations to the provincial labs. Although they expect to see higher and lower case numbers daily that will average out, there is an upward trend in positive case numbers.
The Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) laboratories process large batches of COVID-19 tests. These large batches may be reported throughout the day, immediately before, or after the cut off time that is used when issuing public reporting numbers. When multiple large batches are reported immediately after the public reporting cut off time, it makes the day-to-day testing volumes and case numbers appear variable.
In other zones there were 123 in Saskatoon, 30 in the North East, 26 in the Far North West, 20 in Regina, 16 in the Far North East, eight in the Far North Central, seven in both the Central West and the Central East, three in the South Central and South East and two in the South West zone. There are 10 cases with pending residence information.
The Saskatoon zone leads the Active Case breakdown with 500 cases; the North Central zone is third with 233 active cases.
North Central 2, which includes Prince Albert, has 92 active cases.
North Central 1, which includes communities such as Christopher Lake, Candle Lake and Meath Park, has 134 active cases and North Central 3 has seven active cases.
In second place is Regina with 316 active cases.
Of the 4,820 reported COVID-19 cases in Saskatchewan, 1,691 are considered active, which is a record number.
The recovered number now sits at 3,100 after 43 more recoveries were reported.
The number of people in hospital is 57 in total in the province.
Forty-one people are currently receiving inpatient care; 22 in Saskatoon, four in the North Central, North East and North West, three in the South East and single individuals in the Regina, South West, Far North East and Far North West.
Sixteen people, eight in Saskatoon, three in North Central, two in Central East and Regina and one in the North West, are in intensive care.
The total number of cases is 4,820. Of those, 1,360 cases are from the Saskatoon area, 1,031 cases are from the north area (332 north west, 486 north central and 213 north east), 703 cases are from the Regina area, 619 cases are from the south area (255 south west, 259 south central, 105 south east), 614 cases are from the far north area (479 far north west, 31 far north central and 104 far north east), 473 cases are from the central area (210 central west and 263 central east) and 473 cases are from the central area (210 central west, 263 central east). There are now 20 cases that have pending residence location.
There are currently 140 cases that are health care workers; however, the source of the infections is not related to their work environments in all instances.
Of the 3,623 cases in the province: 405 cases are related to travel, 2,152 are community contacts, which includes mass gatherings, 1,043 have no known exposures and 1,220 are under investigation by local public health.
The age breakdown shows 1,002 cases involve people 19 years of age and under, 1,763 cases are in the 20-39-age range, 1,343 are in the 40-59-age range, 591 are in the 60-79-age range and 121 are in the 80-plus-age range.
The gender breakdown shows 49 per cent of the cases being females and 51 per cent being males.
Yesterday, 3,665 COVID-19 tests were processed in Saskatchewan, the highest test count in the 24-hour reporting period to date.
As of today there have been 294,737 COVID-19 tests performed in Saskatchewan.
