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Saskatchewan gave 5,430 residents a shot in the arm Wednesday.
In its daily COVID-19 media release Thursday, the Ministry of Health said a single-day record number of COVID vaccine doses had been administered the day before. That increased the provincial total to date to 118,195.
The province also reported 115 new COVID cases, 96 recoveries and one death.
Vaccination update
The latest vaccinations were done in the Regina (2,630), Saskatoon (778), northwest (641), southwest (431), far northwest (274), southeast (245), north-central (178), far northeast (131), northeast (54), central-west (35) and central-east (33) zones.
Of those vaccinations, 1,904 were given at the AstraZeneca drive-through clinic at Regina’s Evraz Place. That clinic, which did 3,782 immunizations in the past two days, expanded its eligibility Thursday to those ages 67 to 69.
As of Thursday, 66,101 vaccination appointments had been made through the Saskatchewan Health Authority’s booking system — 47,726 online and 18,375 by telephone.
Starting at noon Thursday, that system was to open to people aged 67 and over as Phase 2 of the province’s rollout plan — the immunization of the general public — began weeks earlier than expected.
Regina region remains hotspot
Of the new COVID cases reported Thursday, 65 were in the Regina region.
There weren’t any new confirmed cases of variants of concern in Saskatchewan, leaving that number at 135. Of that total, 121 are in the Regina zone.
As well, the Regina region has 368 of the 433 presumptive variant cases in Saskatchewan. The others are in the south-central (27), southeast (19), Saskatoon (12), central-east (six) and far northeast (one) areas.
There are 1,282 active COVID cases being reported in Saskatchewan, and 527 of those are in the Regina area. By comparison, Saskatoon has 221 active cases.
The government urged Regina residents to exercise caution and practise all of the usual protective measures to combat the spread of COVID and the variants of concern.
It also suggested residents of the area should refrain from expanding their bubbles to 10 people and avoid unnecessary travel out of the area.
Worship services around the province can expand to 30 per cent of seating capacity or 150 people (whichever is less) as of Friday, but that isn’t permitted in Regina and adjacent communities. Those will remain capped at 30 people.
Asked during a media conference Thursday why stricter measures weren’t enacted in the Regina region, Health Minister Paul Merriman said the government believes those currently in place are tough enough.
“We’ve seen when we asked people to be more compliant in December, the numbers actually trended in the right direction …,” he said. “There was a call for increased public health measures at that time. We chose to hold what we were doing at that point in time and it worked. I have no reason to think that it won’t work (this time).
“The weather’s nicer. People are going to be getting outside; they’re not cooped up in their houses. We’ve got our vaccines. We have testing capacity … We feel the public health measures at this point in time are sufficient. Now that might change. They could change in either direction depending on what our numbers are and what the variants of concern are in Regina.”
A look at the numbers
The other new COVID cases reported Thursday were in the Saskatoon (15), southeast (eight), central-east (five), northwest (four), north-central (three), northeast (three), southwest (three), south-central (three), central-west (two) and far northwest (one) zones.
The hometowns of three new cases are being investigated.
The seven-day average of daily new cases is 128, or 10.4 per 100,000 population. The total number of cases in the province to date stands at 31,085.
A person in the 80-and-over age group from the Saskatoon zone is the 411th resident of the province to die due to COVID.
The recoveries reported Thursday increased that total so far to 29,392.
There are 136 people in Saskatchewan hospitals, including 27 in intensive care. That total includes 11 ICU cases in both Regina and Saskatoon, three in the central-east region and one in each of the northwest and south-central regions.
There were 2,872 tests processed in Saskatchewan on Wednesday, hiking the province’s total to date to 620,536.