By Moira Wyton, The Tyee, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

British Columbia’s indoor mask mandate and vaccine card will remain in place as the province begins to ease pandemic public health orders on  Thursday and transition to a strategy focused on personal risk  management.

The Omicron variant, which  took hold amid loosened public health measures and drove the province’s  fifth wave of COVID-19, is waning enough to look at a less “restrictive”  means of pandemic management, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie  Henry said Tuesday.

Capacity limits on indoor gatherings and  events like weddings and receptions will be removed, and people will be  able to dance and mingle at bars, night clubs and restaurants again.

There will also be no limits on indoor  social gatherings for those who are unvaccinated, and fitness centres,  dance studios, sports tournaments and gyms can operate as usual with no  capacity limits.

Mask mandates and the BC  Vaccine Card will be reviewed on March 15 and April 12, Henry said,  which is also when the province will consider easing visitation  restrictions in long-term care, faith service guidance, and orders in  industrial work camps.

B.C. is now the only  province outside Atlantic Canada without a set expiration date for its  mask mandate and vaccine passport programs.

“We’re not out of this pandemic. We are  very much, I believe, in a transition phase,” said Henry, noting that  more than 90 per cent of B.C. has some protection from either  vaccination or a recent infection, though that protection is  unpredictable and likely to wane with time.

“We have the ability with the amount of immunity and transmission we’re seeing, to begin to lift those restrictions.”

Tuesday’s press conference marked a  decisive shift towards individuals managing their own pandemic risk  while rapid and PCR tests remain inaccessible for all but a select group  of high-risk individuals in long-term care and health care, and for  those who are immunocompromised.

Limited testing makes it difficult to know the exact trajectory of community transmission in B.C.

But hospitalizations have begun to slowly  decrease after peaking at 1,048 on Jan. 31. As of today, there are 787  people in hospital with COVID-19, 124 of them in intensive care.

And 17 more people died due to COVID-19  between Friday and Monday. An average of about nine people have died  each day in February in B.C.

When asked by The Tyee how confident  high-risk and immunocompromised individuals could be with this new  approach, Henry said that people need to go at their own pace and  respect others’ comfort levels.

That may mean limiting gatherings and  people taking additional measures if they are at-risk, she said. “We’re  not through a period yet where the risk is low enough to stop taking  precautions entirely.”

When asked what level of long-term illness  or death would be acceptable with the gradual easing of measures, Henry  did not directly respond. The risk of long COVID still looms for 10 to  30 per cent of people who survive their initial illness.

Henry said that because British Columbians  have gotten vaccinated, the vast majority of cases do not result in  serious illness or death. Those who are dying are unvaccinated people as  young as their 30s or 40s, as well as many seniors and elders in  long-term care.

“We do know that with high rates of  transmission, this small number of people would be so much greater if we  didn’t have that protection of vaccination,” Henry said.

Henry stressed that B.C. is  not yet out of the woods, and that future variants are a likely  possibility. But she said once current orders end, she doesn’t “believe  we will have to go back to broad societal measures.”

“We have downsides of opening up… but we do  have societal downsides of public health orders,” said Henry. “It’s  about finding that balance.”

Top image credit: Hanging out the laundry – Photo by Jacek Pobłocki on Unsplash

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