The province’s Health Minister claims that the absolute earliest time to lift any public health restrictions would be early May, but a flexible plan must be in place.
John Haggie says it will be much harder to undo this public health emergency than it was to implement it. At the end of the day, it’s about behavioral change as well as public health.
Whatever they do, Haggie says it is highly likely that someone else will get COVID-19, and someone else may get very sick from it. He says there is no avenue out of this that is risk-free.
Haggie says they need to wait out the period from Easter and choose what metric they will use to decide what the first step in lifting restrictions will be. Then, they have to have a plan in place that is ready to roll, and he claims that will take different time periods for different elements.
The big question remains around what the modeling will tell them about where they should go first in terms of relaxation.
Haggie says there are experiments ongoing in places like Europe to see if it should be through schools and education, childcare or businesses and if so, what ones. He says it will be a work in progress throughout the next four or five weeks.
Government will then evaluate what they’ve done as some jurisdictions are making one change, waiting two-weeks, and seeing what happens before making any other changes.
Haggie says they need to decide if that is a direction they want to go in as well.
We Need to Adapt to Our New Reality, says Ball
Meanwhile, Premier Dwight Ball compared the adaptations people need to make around a “new normal” to those that were made for travel after 9/11.
The Premier says as travelers, people adapted to the new requirements.
Ball says the virus is around, and as a society, we will have to find a way not to wait it out, but to adapt to the new realities of living with COVID-19.
He claims it will come down to adaptation, how we adjust our lifestyles, and getting back to what the “new normal” is.
Similarly to what we did around 9/11, we will adapt to COVID-19, says Ball.
