Senior medical health officer discusses letter sent to Sask. government

The doctor behind sending a letter to the Saskatchewan government asking for more COVID-19 measures is providing his reasoning.

Senior medical health officer Dr. Cory Neudorf sent the letter showcasing recommendations made by the province’s medical health officers on Oct. 21.

He says the reason all 21 MHOs signed the letter is because there has been a lack of communication between the government and those officials.

“We decided we needed to send a letter directly, because we haven’t been getting a response, especially because that advice is now also coming from many other health-care workers and associations and groups,” Neudorf said.

“For some reason, it isn’t being listened to. We thought it was important for the minister (Paul Merriman) to hear that all the medical health officers in the province are in agreement that this is what’s needed and why.

“You reach critical points where action needs to happen where you’ve given forewarning. Then you start to see the signs of what you were afraid was going to happen actually start to happen, so you give a more forceful warning.”

This is the second time since Aug. 26 that Neudorf and the MHOs have chosen to write to the government. They voiced concerns and recommendations to prevent surging cases for many weeks before the government put some of the current measures into place.

Neudorf claims modelling data showed in May that a significant fourth wave would be approaching in the months ahead, but he says restrictions were dropped and advice was not followed.

“We saw signs of that fourth wave emerging in late August. So a letter was sent at that point after several months worth of warnings,” he said. “The fourth wave was just starting. We sent the letter to say, ‘Here it is. We’ve got evidence now. Let’s act quickly so that this wave doesn’t grow to that big peak that we were predicting.’

“That advice wasn’t followed. And eventually some of those recommendations were put in place once it became very, very obvious that the fourth wave was well upon us. At that point, you’re starting to see that those measures would have been effective back in in August.”

Premier Scott Moe said Monday at his State of the Province address the government should have implemented certain measures sooner.

Despite that, he said further measures would not be warranted unless there was a change in the province’s “trajectory.”

The decrease in positive COVID cases paints a different picture for Neudorf, who says ICU admissions remain high and are expected to stay that way.

“We haven’t seen the slowdown in hospitalizations yet, or in our per cent positivity, which tells me that what you’re seeing is a drastic drop in the numbers of tests being done. But the portion of those tests that are positive is still really, really high,” he said. “That means we’re missing a lot of cases out there right now.

“Projections are that if we don’t do something more, we’ll see that continued strain on the health-care system for months yet, and perhaps even getting quite a bit worse where it leads to system collapse.”

A copy of the letter went to the province’s chief medical health officer, Dr. Saqib Shahab. Neudorf says there was a reason not to ask Shahab to sign off on the letter.

“I didn’t want to put him in a position of asking him to sign. It’s also not directed to him because I know that he is in agreement. He’s heard these recommendations before,” Neudorf claimed.

“We wanted to make sure our recommendations were going straight to the minister, but make sure (Shahab) was aware of why we’re doing this. I didn’t want to put him in a difficult position.”

As of Tuesday, there are 69 people in ICU’s with COVID around the province. There were also 10 new deaths reported.

— With files from 650 CKOM’s Libby Giesbrecht