With 370 new cases of COVID-19 in the province on Saturday; the fifth highest single day number since the pandemic began; there's little doubt that the province is now in a fourth wave of the pandemic driven largely by the more virulent "Delta" variant.

It was a race-against-time that Dr. Kevin Wasko, Physician Executive for Integrated Rural Health, was hoping that we would not lose. In a discussion with Swift Current Online in previous weeks, he spoke of getting vaccination levels to a high enough point before the Delta variant trutly took hold.

But in the end the province ran out of time.

"As a whole, we have over 60% of eligible population that's fully immunized. We are the lowest in the country in terms of our first doses of those who are immunized as well as second doses amongst provinces."

He's spoken before of those who are indifferent to vaccination; neither against, nor for; simply indifferent, and how the strategy to reach those people would rely on convenience. Especially in those lower rural areas where people would need to drive out of their way to get vaccinated, for example.

Now, with other provinces mandating vaccines for travel and other events, that impetus from other provinces might bring a spike in Saskatchewan as well, since despite the Saskatchewan government's insistence that there will be no new mandates, it is increasingly becoming a lone island in a sea of other provinces and states that are doing the opposite.

Very soon, Saskatchewan residents who wish to travel outside of the province will need to be vaccinated whether the Saskatchewan government tells them to or not.

"If someone wishes to travel to British Columbia now, they really will need to be immunized. Or if they want to travel internationally for instance, or visit family in another province in Canada, they will need to be immunized. So that might be enough to get them there. I think that there still are a lot of people who are fairly indifferent, and for them those types of mandates make a difference."

In B.C. for example, he added that they saw a large uptake in vaccine after a vaccine passport was announced. It was a surge that also carried over into Alberta due to the number of expectant travellers from that province.

Wasko does give credit to the Chinook School Division for implementing their own mask mandate in common spaces, and as a parent says that his own son will continue to mask even in classrooms. The good news in that respect, according ot him, is that there are vaccines in clinical trials that would see children from 5-12 to be vaccinated hopefully as soon as mid to late fall.

In Saskatchewan 693,723 residents were vaccinated as of August 29, 2021.