Drinking and driving certainly doesn't appear to have slowed down in Saskatchewan in the midst of a global pandemic.

Last month Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI) traffic safety spotlight focused on impaired driving and a whopping 463 offences were reported by police throughout the province.

While it's a troubling stat for SGI's Manager of Media Relations Tyler McMurchy, he said it represents two things.

"It tells us one, that a lot of people made a poor decision to drive impaired," he said. "It also tells us that the police across Saskatchewan remain very focused on catching impaired drivers."

In a year-over-year comparison, that number is significantly higher than August of 2019 (341 offences) and August of 2018 (347 offences).

"We know impaired driving is never okay," he said. "The only acceptable number of impaired driving collisions, injuries, and fatalities is zero so we will continue to work in that regard."

For the first time since July of 2017, distracted driving offences (556) were lower than seatbelt and child restraint infractions (576).

"We have seen the distracted driving offence numbers come down since the peak that they reached last year, at one point last year they were averaging close to 900 a month," he said. "Once the stronger penalties were announced... Before they even took effect in February we saw numbers come down.

"The seatbelt is the quickest easiest thing you can do to make sure you are safe in the event of a collision. It's not always up to you whether you're the world's best driver, it's not always up to you whether a collision happens, there can be wildlife, there can be mechanical failures, unexpected road conditions, or other drivers that play a factor... There is never a good excuse to not do up your seatbelt, there's plenty of bad ones."

The other stat SGI reports monthly is speeding and aggressive driving tickets which tallied 7,851 in August.