Daycare keeping some precautions as province lifts all COVID restrictions

Just over 70 per cent of eligible people in Saskatchewan have their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, but none of those are children.

None of the vaccines are approved for people under 12 years old and, after Sunday, there aren’t any public health orders in place in Saskatchewan at all. That includes places like daycares where many children end up coming together.

Angie Gelowitz, director at Bright Beginnings Early Childhood Centre in Regina, said staff can no longer require that children wear masks.

“We can encourage … but we don’t trump the government guidelines. So we are still going to encourage mask use and then obviously extra hand-washing and things like that,” said Gelowitz.

She said the centre also will be keeping employees and different groups of kids as separate as possible, and will keep the doors locked to parents and outside visitors.

Gelowitz said at the daycare they’re concerned about restrictions coming down, but they also aren’t.

“I think it’s just at a point now where we feel much safer than we did, let’s say, six months ago,” explained Gelowitz.

She said throughout the 16 months of the pandemic, as far as she knows, the centre hasn’t had any cases of COVID in kids.

“I think what we’re seeing more so is the adults in our program and in the children’s lives are the ones more so being affected more than the children are,” she said.

It’s not clear how long the precautions will continue to be in place at the daycare. Gelowitz said operators are going to discuss it again at their board meeting in the fall.

“We’re for sure going to have these precautions in place throughout the summer and then kind of see what it looks like, I suppose, in September and going forward after that,” said Gelowitz.

Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer, Dr. Saqib Shahab, has said he doesn’t expect children to be able to vaccinated until at least late this year and possibly into 2022.