Former Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador is reflecting on some of the biggest challenges government faced during the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was two years ago today that the province recorded its first case of the virus.
Former Premier Dwight Ball says the situation two years ago was very “day-to-day.”
He says by the time this province first got its case, lives were already being lost around the country and the world, and some very quick decision-making was needed.
He says nobody was prepared to have such drastic changes happen so fast, but there was one piece of legislation that helped them immensely during the early days of COVID.
That being the Public Health Emergency legislation. He says BC had something similar in place, but most other province’s didn’t. It gave them legislative authority to support the decisions they were making,
Even though many of us see March of 2020 as the beginning of COVID, Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Janice Fitzgerald notes that Public Health’s work goes back much further.
Fitzgerald says her team’s work actually began during Snowmageddon. They had to get special authorization to go in and work during that state of emergency.
She says the team at Public Health has had little downtime over the last two years. She says even during the times when case counts were low, they were busy with things like return-to-school plans and changes to contact tracing.
