Low risk of West Nile virus in Saskatoon this summer

With everything 2020 has thrown at us, we can at least rule out a high risk of West Nile virus in Saskatoon.

Jeff Boone, the City of Saskatoon’s entomologist, says crews have been finding the Culex tarsalis mosquito in traps, but in low numbers.

“I describe — and Public Health is describing — the risk as low. There’s not high numbers of Culex tarsalis and I believe in the province we haven’t even had a positive pool of mosquitoes, for mosquitoes that have tested positive for West Nile,” said Boone. “Certainly in Saskatoon we haven’t had anything test positive.”

Boone says as we go into the latter part of August, things really begin to slow down. Crews are still seeing mosquitoes out there, but there are fewer as the days pass.

“More and more (mosquitoes), particularly the Culex tarsalis, go into overwintering mode and the West Nile risk drops off considerably. (It’s) low but not zero, but in a week or so, it gets much closer to zero,” said Boone.

Boone says overall it has been a pretty average season for mosquitoes. Boone says he thought it might be worse with the rain we had earlier in the summer.

“It was one of those years where we expected to see large spikes because of all the early-season rain, but they never really came. We had some cooler weather that kind of kept the numbers low and they never really created one large spike, which often happens in really wet years,” said Boone.

Boone says this will probably go down as maybe the sixth- or seventh-highest year for mosquitoes in the past 10, saying the numbers kind of floated below historic peaks each week.