Province's health system in danger of being overrun
Saskatchewan doctors warn that the province's acute health-care system could be in peril if COVID-19 transmission rates are not flattened.
A Saskatchewan Health Authority presentation to physicians on Thursday night said the province is at a critical juncture as more infectious variants of concern gain ground and fill intensive care units.
“If current trajectory holds, our health system will be overrun,” reads one slide.
Health Minister Paul Merriman said the modelling that underpins that prediction is one of many factors officials look at in determining the extent of public health orders to curb transmission.
“Modelling is important, but it hasn't been the only thing that we've been using as far as what we're looking at for restrictions and our vaccine rollout,” Merriman said.
Saskatchewan reported 221 new cases of COVID -19 on Friday. Two more people with the virus have died, and 190 are in hospital, including 44 in intensive care.
Regina's intensive care units are taking the unprecedented step of placing two patients in the same room after the city was slammed with an outbreak of the B.1.1.7. variant, which is both more transmissible and more deadly. Thirty people with COVID -19 are in the city's ICUS, which is higher than the total number of beds those units had before the pandemic.
That variant is now spreading across the province and threatening other regional hospitals, where staff say they are exhausted after a year on the front lines.
“I think that the overall feeling is that people have been running a marathon, now, for a year and a few months,” said Saskatoon ICU physician Dr. Hassan Masri. “It wasn't supposed to be like that. We were not supposed to run a marathon endlessly.”
Opposition Leader Ryan Meili brought up that fatigue on the floor of the legislature Friday, saying hospital staff are living in a “nightmare.”
“It's incredibly frustrating, sitting and listening to an official report that says we're in a crisis, and then hear the premier and the health minister say `everything's fine, we've got this,' ” Meili said.
Friday also brought mixed news for the vaccine rollout.
Federal Minister of Public Services and Procurement Anita Anand said Moderna, the developer of one of four approved vaccines in Canada, would slash its remaining April deliveries by about half the expected volume because of production issues. Two million doses that were expected in the second quarter of the year have also been shuffled to the third.
On the other hand, Anand said Canada had reached an agreement with Pfizer to buy eight million doses of its vaccine, half of which will arrive in May.
Merriman said the Moderna change-up was yet another frustration with that supplier. That vaccine is used mostly to inoculate people in rural areas outside cities, and shipments from the supplier have been postponed or “split” into two orders, he said.
“We still haven't had the opportunity to go full throttle on our vaccine rollout yet, because we're literally running out of vaccines or we're adjusting because of missed shipments.”
Saskatchewan has administered 323,573 doses of vaccine; 8,168 of them were reported on Friday.
Merriman said he did not know how many appointments the latest change would delay. SHA spokesman Doug Dahl advised people to check their appointments 24 hours in advance to “prevent unnecessary travel and frustration.” Later on Friday, the SHA reported that its drive-thru site in Swift Current would close because it was out of vaccine; Regina's was expected to follow suit by the end of the day.
Masri said he wished people could see what he is seeing in the intensive care ward. He said many of the deaths he has seen were preventable.
“We no longer think of it as something that has to happen.”