Saskatchewan gym owners are coming together to ensure gyms stay open despite rising COVID-19 cases in the province.
Jolene de Vries and her husband, Edward, are both gym owners in southeastern Saskatchewan. They started a group on Facebook recently called the Saskatchewan Fitness Council, which links 100 gym and fitness centre owners throughout the province.
The council is a place for gym owners to share information, as well as ways to ensure that their facilities are more than safe. They have also logged data dating back to June showcasing how gyms have prevented transmission.
“We’re going to continue to update our data and put that out as we collect more surveys,” de Vries said. “We will have data detailing over a million check-ins by the end of Wednesday.”
The data is nothing personal — no names and no faces, only the number of workouts that have been done throughout the province. With the workout data, members of the council are able to calculate the rate of exposure to COVID and rate of transmission for gyms around the province.
“There has been a lot of misinformation out there about gyms, saying that they’re high risk,” de Vries said. “Even though in Saskatchewan there has been exposure all over the place, people seem to pin a lot of it on our industry.
“We are a very low source from an exposure and a transmission standpoint.”
On Tuesday, the Saskatchewan government said it would be consulting with “athletic organizations and gyms to determine how the guidelines, taken seriously by many, can be enhanced to ensure that the necessary measures are being taken to reduce COVID-19 transmission.”
According to de Vries, the gyms that have participated in the council’s survey have logged 798,292 workouts dating back to June 8. The data collected up until last Friday showed a 0.006 per cent rate of exposure along with a 0.00075 rate of transmission for gyms around the province.
“Our main goal is getting fitness facilities reclassified as essential for physical and mental health,” she said.
De Vries says she is writing a letter detailing the information gathered so far, hoping to speak with Saskatchewan Health Minister Paul Merriman along with any other ministers or health experts.
“We will hopefully get our meeting and hopefully get reclassified as an essential health service. Whether we have a meeting over Zoom or in person, we hope we get it,” she said.
“There will be people out there that say, ‘You know, gyms are dirty (and) they don’t meet standards.’ One of the things we want to do as a council is to help set those standards. So if people aren’t meeting them, we need to change that.”
De Vries is worried about what another prolonged closure would mean for gyms around the province.
“I would say we could see another 20 to 30 per cent of facilities maybe not coming out of this,” she claimed. “We are trying to show that gyms can be a safe space.”
When the original closure of gyms and fitness centres happened March 18, de Vries began sending letters to the premier’s office as well as speaking with different ministers about what could be done moving forward.
When June 8 came around, de Vries was ready to show that gyms could be a place at which people could be comfortable.
“People use our facilities to help manage stress. They use our facilities to help manage things like bipolar disorder, anxiety — all that type of stuff,” she said. “Without us, not saying we’re the only outlet, but we are an outlet where people can find it to be a safe place.
“Sometimes when the rest of the system fails someone, we can be there to help pick them up.”