Following the weekend announcement, Premier Scott Moe defended the decision to move forward with lifting public health orders, despite the province not yet reaching its reopening plan’s set thresholds.
Saskatchewan was meant to hit the target of 70 per cent of residents aged 12 and up having received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, before proceeding with Phase Three of the current plan.
However, the province confirmed on Sunday that it would be removing all remaining public health orders on July 11, even though only 68.2 per cent of individuals over the age of 12 had received their first dose.
Moe said the decision to bump up the announcement was made in consultation with public health officials, with confidence that the province will reach the 70 per cent threshold required very soon.
“We’ll achieve that at some point this week,” Moe said. “We’ve put out about a million doses that have been provided to Saskatchewan residents today, [and] we’re most certainly going to go by that [threshold] before we ever get to July 11.”
Among the remaining public orders set to disappear are the mandatory masking and capacity limitations currently in place, as well as limits on retail and restaurant.
“People have been looking for and striving to achieve this by going out and getting vaccinated in large numbers,” Moe said.
Public health is still pushing for people to seek vaccination, said Moe, as the second dose campaign continues and officials call on residents who haven’t gone for their first dose to do so soon.
An increase in booked appointment availability, drive-through clinic times and mobile units travelling across the province are just part of the province’s end-game push in its vaccination program.
“Seventy per cent is not the finish line, it's the benchmark so that we can move forward,” Moe said. “We need to go further, and we will go further [and] seventy per cent is not when we close down the vaccination clinics and say, ‘you missed your chance.’”
He also said officials have no concerns that linking a complete lift of public health orders to first dose thresholds will slow the rate of second dose delivery.
“With international travel, the second dose and being fully vaccinated do come into play, most certainly, even as you start to see travel over the U.S.-Canada border,” Moe said. “So I think we’re going to see a very high uptake in second doses.”
Opposition leader Ryan Meili had few complaints on the decision, as case numbers and hospitalization rates continue to trend downwards in the province.
“I’ll be watching very closely what happens with vaccination rates,” Meili said. “Our case numbers are really low and that does give you more flexibility, but I think a more honest approach to this from the beginning would have been to have a series of measures to look at, with vaccination being one.”
Meili also encouraged residents to continue seeking immunization despite the lift in restrictions, to help curb the potential spread of variants over the summer.
“We’re seeing the rise of the Delta variant, and we know that other places are seeing high numbers of cases [so] please don’t think that was the finish line,” Meili said.
