Saskatchewan COVID-19 hospitalizations briefly underreported this week: province

The Saskatchewan government says “ongoing data validation” led to two days of underreporting COVID-19-related hospitalizations this week.

Thursday’s COVID-19 update stated that the errors have now been corrected, revealing that Tuesday saw the most people hospitalized at any one time since the pandemic began.

Prior to the correction, government data showed the number of cases at 202 Monday, 202 Tuesday (in Tuesday’s daily update the Ministry of Health said new hospitalization data was unavailable as data reporting systems were being updated)  and 185 Wednesday.

New data on the government of Saskatchewan website shows that hospitalizations actually rose to 238 on Tuesday — a new record.

The data shows 205 people in inpatient care, with 33 in the ICU.

Hospitalizations actually dropped to 229 on Wednesday and on Thursday sat at 216.

The error was brought to the forefront Thursday by Opposition Leader Ryan Meili.

Prior to the corrections being announced, Meili kicked off a press conference by calling the then-erroneous numbers into question.

“They’re under-representing the pressures on the health-care system. They’re under-representing the number of people who are sick, and under-representing the workload of front-line health-care workers,” he said.

At the time, he speculated that the province had stopped reporting hospitalized individuals that are no longer infectious.

The province clarified in today’s update, though, that current daily hospitalization data include both infectious and non-infectious individuals.

2:09 Coronavirus testing on the decline in Saskatchewan