Saskatoon’s Chief Medical Health Officer recently said she felt the “COVID Curve” was flattening in Saskatchewan’s largest city. Following a second straight day of sub-200 new cases of the novel coronavirus, as reported in Wednesday’s update from the Ministry of Health, can the same be said for the province?!

       There were no deaths reported due to COVID-19 for the first time in five days with 169 new cases of the virus…the fewest since November 25th’s 164 new cases. The seven-day average of new cases in the province dropped by 20 from Tuesday to 243 Wednesday. Add in 154 recoveries and the active case count is at 4,213 in Saskatchewan…with 124 infections in hospital, 30 of those being treated in an I-C-U.

       Of Wednesday’s 164 new cases, all 13 provincial zones had at least one with 11 new cases requiring residence information. Saskatoon had 38 of the new cases, 35 from the North West zone, 30 from Regina, 28 from North Central and the remaining 22 new cases spread out amongst the nine other zones. In total, since the pandemic was declared in mid-March, there have been 12,594 reported cases of COVID-19 in Saskatchewan with 98 deaths, 4,213 active cases and 8,283 people having recovered.

Of the 12,594 cases in the province:

• 562 cases are travelers;
• 5,878 are community contacts (including mass gatherings);
• 2,827 have no known exposures; and
• 3,327 are under investigation by local public health.

Overall in Saskatchewan to date:

• 514 cases are healthcare workers; however, the source of the infections may not be related to healthcare in all instances.
• 2,672 cases involve people 19 years of age and under, while the remainder are adults.
• 4,416 cases are in the 20-39 age range; 3,292 are in the 40-59 age range; 1,660 are in the 60-79 age range; and 549 are in the 80-plus range. Confirmation of age is pending for five cases.
• 50 per cent of the cases are female and 50 per cent are male.
• 98 deaths related to COVID-19 have been reported to date.

Of 12,594 confirmed cases:

• 3,709 cases are from the Saskatoon area
• 2,766 cases are from the north area (1059 north west, 1,304 north central, 403 north east)
• 2,524 cases are from the Regina area
• 1,444 cases are from the south area (542 south west, 496 south central, 406 south east)
• 1,330 cases are from the far north area (793 far north west, 95 far north central, 442 far north east)
• 781 cases are from the central area (320 central west, 461 central east)
• 40 cases have pending residence information

To date, 393,680 COVID-19 tests have been processed in Saskatchewan.  As of December 14, 2020 when other provincial and national numbers were available, Saskatchewan’s per capita rate was 243,150 people tested per million population.  The national rate was 337,648 people tested per million population.

On Tuesday, 2,270 COVID-19 tests were processed in Saskatchewan.