COVID-19 in Sask.: Hospitalizations rise to 119, ICU numbers remain static

Saskatchewan's hospitalizations from the COVID-19 virus are slowly rising, increasing by five to 119 on Sunday, while the number of patients in intensive care remained at 13 from Saturday.

In the provincial update, there were 59 inpatient hospitalizations from a COVID-19 related illness, 36 incidental, asymptomatic infections and 11 haven't yet been determined.

In ICUs, 10 are related to COVID-19, two are incidental and one hasn't been determined.

Provincial government officials said Saskatchewan would be using hospitalizations as the key metric to implement new public health measures rather than case counts. That coincided with an announcement that asymptomatic residents who tested positive on a rapid antigen test should forgo PCR testing and consider themselves positive for the virus.

Despite that announcement, which could potentially reduce the active case count in the province, the number of active recorded cases have continued to spike beyond record levels. On Sunday, the provincial COVID-19 dashboard showed there were 7,418 active cases recorded in the province.

Saskatchewan's highest active case count before this Omicron-dominated fifth wave was 4,864.

There were also 1,099 new cases reported. When taking into account the 3,838 PCR tests taken and reported, Saskatchewan had a test positivity rate of 28.6 per cent though this doesn't count positive rapid antigen tests.

The new cases were reported in the following health regions:

• Far northwest: seven.
• Far northeast: two.
• Northwest: 11.
• North central: 25.
• Northeast: 20.
• Saskatoon: 361.
• Central west: 27.
• Central east: 60.
• Regina: 285.
• Southwest: 54.
• South central: 35.
• Southeast: 133.

Another 79 new cases are pending residence information.

There were no new deaths reported Sunday.

During a press conference on Thursday, Public Safety Agency president Marlo Pritchard said some elements of the COVID-19 dashboard would not be updated, including the variants of concern and death tables.

There were 1,968 new reported doses of vaccine on Sunday.

Of them, 738 were first doses and about 1,230 were a full dose of vaccine (whether that be two shots of a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine or Moderna vaccine, or one shot of the Janssen vaccine).

There have been a total of 1,815,461 doses of vaccine. Nearly 950,000 are first doses and the remaining nearly 870,000 make up full dosages.