Concern growing in Martensville as COVID-19 cases rise

People in Martensville, Sask. are beginning to feel uneasy as COVID-19 begins to spread rapidly throughout the community.

Mayor Kent Muench said one of the biggest problems is a lack of publicly available data preventing him and other residents from understanding the situation.

“I think there is some frustration with that,” Muench said. “I think there’s always room to improve communication. I think in the end that’s what people are looking for — they’re just looking for clear, articulate messaging as far as what’s happening.”

With the Saskatchewan Health Authority releasing data by region, Martensville’s close proximity to Saskatoon means all of its data is lumped in with the larger area.

Dr. Jasmine Hasselback, a medical health officer with the SHA, met with a local doctor and officials in the city just north of Saskatoon, about the increase of COVID-19 cases.

A post on the local healthcare centre’s Facebook page indicated the coronavirus is spreading quickly.

“It is remarkable how quickly the community of Martensville went from having very few cases to widespread community transmission,” Hasselback said in a post on the Martensville Collective Health and Wellness page.

“The pace at which COVID-19 is moving through the community indicates that there has been a combination of factors that have allowed the virus to move quickly including, lots of overlapping bubbles and situations where the virus was able to transmit to many people in a short period of time.”

Muench said the information from that meeting last week has spread through the community quickly and everyone is doubling down on their precautions.

Minor hockey and minor soccer suspended operations this week, and all city programming and rental bookings were halted for two weeks.

“I don’t know that people were doing things differently, maybe they were getting a little fatigued or something, but I guess we’re seeing the effects now,” he said.

Chris Buhr owns Forge Fitness in Martensville. He sees his gym as a safe place after constantly reviewing safety measures. His concern lies with hockey teams and schools, places he said were to be known spreaders in the area.

“I’m not shocked that it’s going through schools and the hockey teams,” he said. “I’m more shocked that it’s so prevalent in the community because it’s really been pretty quiet here up until now.”

Buhr said gyms aren’t the cause of widespread transmission. With the doors being closed to the public, around the clock sanitization and mandatory mask usage, he trusts members of his gym to keep one another safe.

However, he also doesn’t feel kids should be negatively impacted.

“I’m on both sides of it. You obviously want to see this go away, but how much of peoples’ lives need to be completely affected by it?” Buhr said.

“The dreams of entering the pro leagues, that’s something that will carry a kid through the first 18 years of life. There’s no real easy way to go about it.”

With numerous COVID-19 exposures announced by the SHA in recent weeks, both Buhr and Muench feel the messaging from health officials is beginning to stick.

“That will kind of close some of those gaps up where the virus found its way in, and once it found its way in, it spread quick,” Muench said.