Fifth person dies in Sask. from COVID-19; far north dealing with outbreak

Health officials in Saskatchewan say nearly all of the cases of COVID-19 in a remote northern community are related to travel from Alberta.

On Monday, the government announced 12 new cases of infection and an additional death in the province, with most of them in the far north.

There are 29 confirmed cases of the illness in the village of La Loche, about 600 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon. All but three have been linked to northern Alberta.

Premier Scott Moe said the health authority has a list of people who have returned from work camps in Alberta and those people are being asked to self-isolate.

The outbreak comes as Moe plans to lift some restrictions on public health measures and allow more businesses to reopen next month.

“This again shows how quickly COVID can transmit,” Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer, Dr. Saqib Shahab, told a news conference about the northern outbreak.

“One or two people can generate two or three additional cases in a week.

“Within two, three weeks you can get into the dozens of cases, and within five or six weeks you can get into hundreds of cases.”

The government said officials are doing contact tracing, drive-thru testing and developing more ways to have mobile testing in La Loche.

Last week, health officials in Alberta said an outbreak of COVID-19 at Imperial Oil’s Kearl oilsands project near Fort McMurray in northeastern Alberta, which flies in workers from across Canada, was linked to cases in several other provinces, including Saskatchewan.