Epidemiologist looks at COVID-19 in Saskatchewan

As Saskatchewan continues to navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic, one epidemiologist is looking towards what the future could look like.

“We want to build on that success with vaccinations and continue to see a reduction in active case rates because about 20 per cent, one in five of your cases you’ve ever had, are active right now. That’s obviously too high and you want to bring it down because the more cases that are active, the more people can be affected and you have to be healthy in order to be vaccinated,” Cynthia Carr, an epidemiologist and principal consultant with EPI Research Inc. out of Manitoba, told Gormley on Monday.

She said she’s hearing if you’ve had COVID-19, you need to wait 90 days to get the vaccine.

So what will it look like when Saskatchewan turns the corner?

“We’ll see more of a sustained and obvious decline,” Carr said.

Much like Manitoba, Saskatchewan saw spikes after Christmas and Thanksgiving. Saskatchewan now leads the country in most active cases per 100,000 people.

“What you want to see if that sort of sustained decrease and then maybe a plateau and then a decrease and a plateau but not pushing back up again,” Carr said. “A great goal would be less than one new case per day per 100,000 residents.

“That’s what Harvard University calls the green zone and right now you’re up in the high 20s. You’re in the red zone. This could just become endemic in the population so I don’t think our target can be zero but it certainly needs to be lower than 25 cases a day per 100,000 residents.”

Saskatchewan’s test positivity rate has been as high as 13 and 14 per cent during the spikes of the pandemic. While Carr said she wasn’t sure about Saskatchewan’s policy, in Manitoba health officials have only been testing people with symptoms.

“Our positive test rate has also been confusing people because it has kind of waffled around 10 per cent and then people will say it was 10 per cent in November. But in November, we did twice as many tests, we had much more cases, we had much more people with symptomatic illness. We always have to look at the positive test rate but what’s the denominator? What is the number of people being tested?” Carr said.

And she admitted there was some worries about how flu season could affect testing.

“People get sick and end up in the hospital but also many of the symptoms were the same and we were worried about a huge volume increase in people being tested because they wouldn’t know if it was COVID or influenza. Fortunately that pressure hasn’t happened but you do need to look at both to see what that 10 per cent rate is coming from and has the total number of tests come down,” Carr said.

She said about six to eight per cent of COVID-19 patients end up in hospital.

“Those numbers add up fast because we have to remember the median length of stay is 11 days and it can be higher than that for older people. For every person that ends up in the hospital, that’s a long time in a bed and about 50 per cent of those (are) in the ICU,” Carr said.

While vaccinations are underway in the province, Carr said that’s only one tool in the toolbox.

“Our data right now is about symptomatic disease. We still don’t know about how effective the vaccines are in stopping the train of transmission between people. We know there are variants that are highly contagious and the only way to stop mutations and variance occurring is to not allow that virus to get into our body,” Carr said.

And she said the mental health aspect isn’t one that can be ignored.

“We do need to look at ways of opening safely, getting kids back to sports and other activities along with the rest of us because the impact on our social and economic well-being has been profound,” Carr said.