Want some good news in the COVID-19 fight?
One strongly suspects you do.
You probably need some good news after a month of fighting this virus.
Self-isolating at home and not being able to see friends and family and trying to keep six feet apart of everyone you meet as if they might be trying to steal your wallet or your pursue can be very exhausting.
And as if health concerns were not enough, we also have to deal with the prospects of what all of this is doing to the economy and how long it might take to recover.
It’s all been exhausting and the end is not necessarily in sight.
To get through this, we need to keep in mind that this will be long fight with setbacks.
We will get through this, but there are going to be many hurdles along the way.
Those ups and downs will the hardest part, especially, when it seems the “downs” always seem to be accompanied by tragic news of death.
So to get through this bad news, let’s glean through the numbers to find something positive. And the numbers do show positive things. Let’s start with the numbers of new cases that, as of the writing of this column, seem to be trending in the right direction.
Early last week before the Easter weekend, Saskatchewan registered just four new cases on April 6 and only seven cases on April 7.
The single-digit daily increase might be a bit misleading in that we know that there for any one COVID-19 positive test, there many times more cases where people haven’t been diagnosed.
But even if one views the diagnosed cases like polling, it’s obviously good news to see smaller numbers.
What the numbers also show is the value of social-distancing and perhaps the natural advantage that Rural Saskatchewan enjoy for a change.
As of April 7, the case numbers show that out of the total 260 cases, show 131 in Saskatoon, 52 in Regina and 48 in the north.
(The disproportionally high northern numbers are largely due to an infection at a snowmobile club banquet in Christopher Lake, showing exactly why Premier Scott Moe’s government wisely imposed the strict rules prohibiting public gatherings to less than 250 people and then later limited gatherings to less than 10 people.)
That left four cases in the far north, 10 in central Saskatchewan and 15 in southern Saskatchewan.
With only 25 known cases in that vast area we call “rural Saskatchewan”, statistics show it might very well be one the safest places on Earth.
So good have our strategies been at reducing these case numbers that, for the first time since Saskatchewan’s first case on March 12, we had more people who had recovered from COVID-19 in a day (14) than new identified cases (four).
That had led government to produce a new, positive statistic _ called “active cases” that totalled 169 as of April 7. (That was based on 260 known cases and 88 recoveries.)
Here is a statistic that’s really promising: The number of “active cases” a week early on March 30 was only 159. In other words, there were only10 additional active cases in a week.
This is literally what we mean when we say “Flatten The Curve”, limiting the growth so our emergency rooms aren’t swamped.
And here is a bit more good statistical news: At 214 cases per million people, Saskatchewan has a lower rate of COVID-19 known infections than anywhere in Canada and the U.S. other than Minnesota and West Virginia. (And those two states are testing at half the rate.)
It’s a long fight, we haven’t won and there will be setbacks.
But the numbers show we are making progress.
