Saskatchewan relaxed COVID-19 restrictions. Then the variants came.
The province expanded gathering limits despite warnings from epidemiologists and health-care professionals
Saskatchewan's push to limit the spread of COVID-19 in the province continues this week after a calamitous rise in cases and hospitalizations.
The increase in cases comes despite a push to vaccinate as many people in the province as possible, as quickly as possible.
The province tightened public health rules last week, limiting bubbles to people's immediate households across the province and limiting places of worship to 30 people.
Experts who have spoken with CBC News say the new measures are positive, but are also too little too late.
"It is better than not doing anything like this at all," Nazeem Muhajarine, an epidemiologist and professor at the University of Saskatchewan, told CBC's Saskatoon Morning last week.
Here is how Saskatchewan got to where it is.
The path to now
The tightened restrictions are similar to rules the provincial government relaxed more than a month ago on March 9.
"It's an approach that I feel shows that we respect and trust the people of the province, that they are going to make decisions that are in the best interests of not only them but their families," said Premier Scott Moe at the time.
From March 9 to April 13, the number of cases in the province increased by 23 per cent and 56 more people with the virus died.
Day-to-day data can vary for a variety of reasons — including how many tests were processed or delays in reporting — producing big spikes and valleys rather than an accurate sense of what is actually happening. So rather than counting the cases that were announced on a daily basis, we'll look at the seven-day rolling average.
In the month before restrictions were relaxed, Saskatchewan's rolling average was slowly but surely coming down.
From Feb. 9 to March 9, the average dropped to 141 cases from 203.
It would continue to decline in the days after the announcement, before starting to climb and eventually doubling in a little more than a month.
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The figure reached its peak of 284 cases on April 15, only two days after the province announced it would reintroduce its public health restrictions
Since the reintroduction, the rolling average has dropped off, reaching 253 on Monday.
What happened
Even before the province officially announced it would relax health rules in March, multiple experts were warning of the potential negative consequences of reopening things too soon.
Senior medical health officer Dr. Julie Kryzanowski had told a virtual town hall for doctors the week before that the province's case rate and infections per positive case had not met the authority's goals.
Muhajarine told CBC News at the time that there were many factors that could potentially drive cases back up.
These included the then-recent detection of COVID-19 variants of concern, which are more transmissible and potentially more deadly.
"This is not the time to rush," he said. "I think things can change very quickly."
Muhajarine would quickly be proven right.
Variants have become the dominant strain of COVID-19 in some areas in the province. In others, the variants have fuelled a surge in cases, threatening to overwhelm the province's intensive-care units.
Despite urging from multiple health-care workers to re-institute the restrictions, it would take more than a month for the province to do so.
Throughout it all, government officials have said they could not have seen this coming.
"We made decisions with what we had in front of us," Health Minister Paul Merriman said last week, when asked whether it had been a mistake to loosen restrictions.
Experts say Easter was likely a complicating factor during the period where restrictions were loosened.
Despite urging from health officials across the province to not travel, doctors say they are seeing people who did just that.
"Now we're sort of paying for that with a number of cases we're seeing, in the surges we're seeing," said Dr. David Torr, the medical health lead for south rural Saskatchewan.
What comes next
More changes could be on the way.
Moe told CKOM radio show host John Gormley on Friday that the province will soon need to start assessing when it plans to ease COVID-19 restrictions once again.
"I think in the days ahead or the next short while, you can look to the Government of Saskatchewan to start to provide some details around that conversation," he said.
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With files from CBC's Mickey Djuric and CBC's Saskatoon Morning