Saskatchewan will start a careful and phased reopening in May, beginning with golf courses, hair salons and retail stores.

What about Alberta? Premier Jason Kenney and his emergency cabinet are digging into this question.

Should Alberta follow Saskatchewan’s lead?

The spread of COVID-19 in Alberta and Saskatchewan was tracking closely, said Alberta’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Deena Hinshaw on Thursday, but then Alberta had two significant outbreaks at huge meat-processing plants.

This has led to an uptick in hospitalization and ICU numbers in Alberta, although the province is still well below where Alberta Health forecasters predicted it would be if there were no restrictions, Hinshaw said.

Alberta’s model predicted about 50 people in ICU by now and about 375 in the hospital. Instead, we have 18 in ICU and 72 hospitalized with COVID-19.

The group of Albertans most keen for reopening leans toward following the Swedish model. Most stores, hair salons, restaurants, factories and public facilities have remained open in Sweden, even without massive testing, strict quarantines or any mass public use of face masks.

Epidemiologist Johan Giesecke, an adviser to the Swedish government, who from 2005 to 2014 was the first chief scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, described the Swedish approach in

Earlier this week, I asked Hinshaw how she evaluates the various approaches to public health from different nations — all of which claim to be based on the best science, even as their recommendations vary widely.

“We are looking at these different models and looking at the evidence that is emerging about the effectiveness and the advantages and disadvantages of different models,” she said. “One of the things to keep in mind that each of those models is within a particular cultural and social context.”

The big question is, will something that might work in Sweden also work in Alberta?

From her own reading on Sweden’s less restrictive approach, Hinshaw said, “The pieces that I’ve read are indicating that some of the reason for that success is that as a population, the people who live in Sweden tend to be more following the advice of the authorities, of their medical expertise … You can’t just sort of export it wholesale, you have to adjust it to the model and the context that’s appropriate for our society.”

For now Alberta is sticking with something of a made-in-Taiwan approach. Kenney has said Alberta is adopting best practices from countries like Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore.

Those Asian states have had the most success at keeping much of businesses and schools open while also containing the virus with a strict regimen of quarantines, contact tracing and widespread use of face masks.

It’s worth noting, however, that infection rates are now shooting high in Singapore, reports ScienceMag.org, mainly due to outbreaks in crowded migrant worker dormitories, and this has led to more restrictions.

In an interview with the Telegraph, Prof. Daniel Falush, a geneticist at the Institute Pasteur in Shanghai, China, said heading into this new viral outbreak, western world pandemic planning had been characterized by a “fatalism” not evident in Asia.

Western health authorities believed there was no way out of COVID-19 other than building up herd immunity, either through vaccination or infection.

But Asian health authorities had a different plan, Falush said. “The alternative framing is: ‘There is no other realistic way out other than reducing viral transmission to zero’. That’s how they see it in Asia.”

The Asian approach is how the situation is now trending in Alberta and the rest of Canada.

If nothing else we’ve given ourselves some breathing room with our strict approach, allowing our hospitals to get ready. We’re not overwhelmed by the virus. We’re not in a panic. It’s a good place to be as we chart out next step.

dstaples@postmedia.com

@davidstaplesYEG