Canada: Saskatchewan: Health officials are monitoring a new mutation of COVID-19

CTV News in Canada shows that Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer said he’s closely watching a new mutation of COVID-19 in the province.

Derivatives of the Delta variant, called AY.25 and AY.27, have been detected in Saskatchewan.

The dangerous COVID-19 pandemic in the geographical area of Saskatchewan is part of an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19], a novel infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The province of Saskatchewan, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada ranks 6th amongst provinces and territories in terms of overall cases, and 3rd in total cases per-million residents.

The virus timeline is interesting for the province of Saskatchewan in the country of Canada. Chief Medical Officer Saqib Shahab announced the first presumptive case of in the province on March 12, 2020, a person in their 60s that had recently returned from Egypt. A provincial state of emergency was declared on March 18, and the province began to institute mandatory closures of non-essential facilities and lines of business over the days that followed. Saskatchewan reported its first deaths from COVID-19 on March 30. By April 6, the number of new recoveries began to regularly equal or exceed the number of new cases, which also began to steadily drop. On April 23, Premier Scott Moe stated that Saskatchewan's caseload was 70% below the national average per-province, and hospitalizations and deaths were 90% below average.

The province's first major outbreak began in late-April, centred upon the remote northwestern community of La Loche. It was traced to an outbreak at the Kearl Oil Sands Project in northern Alberta, with wider community spread attributed to overcrowded living conditions in local First Nations communities. In June and July, a new outbreak emerged in the western and central regions of the province, centred around communal Hutterite colonies. The province hit a new peak of 332 active cases during the spike, which subsided by late-August. In early-October, the number of new cases in Saskatchewan began to rapidly increase in urban communities, with a gospel outreach in Prince Albert being attributed as a superspreader event, and increasing community spread in Saskatoon - particularly at nightclubs.