COVID-19 concerns forced the City of Estevan to close the leisure centre on Wednesday, May 5. As it turns out, that closure will end up lasting exactly one week. 

The city announced this afternoon they would be reopening the leisure centre tomorrow morning as of 6:00. Indoor and outdoor recreation programming are both available, though both will require pre-registration. 

"We will be reopening with our scheduled programming," said parks and facilities manager Rod March. "The reason for that is we were short on some staff who were affected by COVID variants and contact tracing and that sort of things. Now, things are back to a staffing level that is sufficient to meet the cleaning needs to let the public in the building."

The original plan for the city was to reopen the pool on Monday as well, though that had to be delayed as the whole facility was closed. The pool is among the things reopening tomorrow, however. 

"We took advantage of that bit of time to do some extra cleaning, even though that's done on a regular basis anyway, we were short of people," said March. "Of course, we keep a lot of other buildings in the city clean as well. With the people that we had, we took advantage and cleaned it up and it's ready to go again now."

March confirmed there had been COVID cases at the leisure centre but could not say how many of them had contributed to the rise in cases in Estevan's subzone over the last week. He also said people were best off to check the schedule at estevan.ca because a couple of their instructors who were not ready to come back yet.

"We have had cases in the leisure centre, which prompted the health authority to contact the city as the owner of the building," he said. "I just took the advice of the health authority and followed exactly what they were saying."