There was little talk of COVID during Monday night's meeting of Swift Current city council.

Among the regular business of running a small city, the council focused mainly on the upgrade to the water treatment plant and a host of board appointments.

But Councillor Tom Christianson capped off the evening with a message to the residents of Swift Current, citing them as the reason the southwest's COVID-19 case numbers remain relatively low.

"Another thing I wanted to mention was I just wanted to commend and give a sincere thank-you to all of our citizens who have just been doing a wonderful job of keeping our COVID numbers low."

Checking the numbers daily, he's noticed that the region is consistently leading the way with the fewest cases since the holiday season, and encouraged everyone to stay vigilant and keep it up.

Mayor Bridal echoed the sentiment with comments of his own and noting that many places with similar populations have far higher numbers.

"Our citizens have been masking up and cleaning their hands, and our rates are way down. And I know some people say oh, you're sparsely populated. Well, there are lots of other places in the province that are as sparsely populated as us or even sparser and their numbers are way higher. So I think that it's kudos to all of our citizens for doing what we've been asked."

Yesterday's update from the Saskatchewan Health Authority marked the first time this year that the province's daily case numbers dropped back into the double digits.

In the southwest, the region has now dropped to 9 active cases.