The latest wastewater sampling in three Saskatchewan cities shows huge declines in the amount of COVID-19 present. And the samples didn’t pick up the subvariants scientists previously couldn’t identify.
The viral load dropped 85.3 per cent in Saskatoon, 90.2 per cent in North Battleford and 65.7 per cent in Prince Albert, from the week prior.
Toxicologist John Giesy, team lead at the USask Global Institute for Water Security, which takes the measurements, called the numbers good news.
“In addition to that big relative drop, the actual absolute values are getting back to right where we were when we started this last wave,” he said.
He added that this translates into a lot fewer infected people in the three cities.
He told Global News the lack of public health mandates coupled with the highly infectious BA.2 Omicron subvariant is what boosted the previous week’s readings so high.
As well, the samples didn’t detect the virus material which the team previously couldn’t identify, which accounted for 17.6 per cent in North Battleford in the last reporting period.
Get daily National news
The findings this week show BA.2 once again counts for 100 per cent of the detected virus.
Giesy said the team is still waiting for official results to come back from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg with regards to what those mysterious subvariants were, but suspects most of the unidentified virus was BA.3.
- Montreal public health warns of overdose spike as naloxone use reaches last year’s total
- Saskatchewan boosts disaster aid in response to storm-packed spring and summer
- World champion curler, long-time broadcaster Don Duguid dies at 90
- Corus to centralize Calgary, Edmonton news production, some jobs cut
-
![]()
Cyclospora outbreak source not confirmed, health officials investigating link to lettuce, greens -
![]()
CN rail train drives through inferno as wildfires ravage northwestern Ontario -
![]()
WestJet flight attendants vote in favour of strike -
![]()
Immigration lawyer reacts as some “Lost Canadians” told to return citizenship certificate
He said studies from South Africa and the United Kingdom show, as of now, that BA.3 doesn’t appear to be much more transmissible than the (already highly infectious) BA.2 subvariant.
“We only had one sample that showed we might have had one of the X recombinants, but we weren’t real sure on that because we weren’t seeing all the mutations,” he said, speaking to another emerging subvariant.
He told Global News the team will continue monitoring the virus levels in the wastewater to monitor whether the amounts stay low.
Comments
Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first.