Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer reflects on one of busiest years yet

This year has been a year like no other as Saskatchewan, like the rest of the world, deals with the coronavirus pandemic.

Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer has been tasked with making many of the decisions on ways to keep people in the province as safe as possible.

As we say goodbye to 2020, Global News’ Katelyn Wilson sat down with Dr. Saqib Shahab to talk about the challenges of navigating this unchartered territory.

The following are his answers in a Q&A format.

Q- When COVID-19 cases started appearing in March, the province took a huge leap with the lockdown, even though numbers were fairly low. Why was such an aggressive approach needed?

A- Well, at that time, we didn’t know much about the virus, how it transmits and what we can do to control it? The readiness of the health system wasn’t there either in terms of personal protective equipment, PPE, and all those things. Most countries and most jurisdictions did go into quite a significant precautionary kind of lockdown to buy some time for hospitals and health care facilities to ramp up their readiness.

Q- As COVID-19 cases started to climb into the fall and winter, there has been some criticism that the province is reacting too slow and not being proactive. How do you respond to that?

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A- We look at our own case numbers and we look at transmission settings and we adjust our recommendations whether it is reopen Saskatchewan guidelines, public health orders and we’re adjusting them as we need to. If you remember in March, we could gather in groups of up to 10 and we used to say pick two or three households and stick to up to groups of 10 and then we gradually expanded it to 15, 30 and then came back down to 15.

Now, unfortunately, it’s much stricter. It’s going to be critical over the holidays because our case numbers are high and they’re stabilizing. If we lose this opportunity of staying connected, but staying apart for the holidays we will see a significant surge in January. Then unfortunately, we may have to take even stricter measures over January and February. And, of course, the health system will come under pressure.

1:58 New retail restrictions in effect in Saskatchewan

Q- As we saw restrictions tighten up again over the past few months, how difficult has it been to get the public on board, especially when we see anti-masks rallies continue to pop up?

A- In Saskatchewan overall, the population has really gone out of its way and above and beyond the restrictions. That’s really important because everything can’t be done by restrictions or rules and regulations. A lot of it is really is up to all of us.

Q-It’s been a long year and as we move forward and see the vaccine start to roll out, how does it feel seeing the light at the end of the tunnel?

A- It’s a good news story that we are getting the vaccine, but we have to remember it’s going to come in a very slow, systematic way. We won’t really see the full benefit of vaccination at a population level till the summer when it’ll be available to everyone, young adults and school-age children. That’s when we’ll hopefully get some herd immunity. We hope that we’ll have less restrictions once summer comes this year because we’ll have more of the population vaccinated.