EDITORIAL: Winding down COVID-19 protocols

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Learning to live with COVID-19. It’s a phrase that’s now been uttered by a number of public health officials across Canada. It’s even made its way into formal government documents.

Learning to live with COVID-19 means different things to different people, and there are a variety of ways to go about it.

At its most basic, it means acknowledging what some infectious diseases experts have been saying for some time now — that this virus is becoming endemic.

This means that it is not something that’s going to disappear anytime soon or, perhaps, even this century. The good news is that due to treatments, vaccines and acquired immunity the severity of the virus lessens and recedes into the background.

Learning to live with COVID-19 doesn’t mean failing to protect the vulnerable and it doesn’t mean that we stop taking COVID-19 seriously.

But it does mean that we wind down our COVID-19 protocols.

There have been a variety of serious reports and warnings about the harms that have been caused to society — particularly our youth — by measures enacted to deal with the pandemic.

We now owe it to people to let them live their lives again just as much as we owed it to our vulnerable to protect them from the worst outcomes of the virus.

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While we were not enthusiastic about the introduction of provincial domestic vaccine passports, the federal government is right to create a standardized passport system to help with international travel.

We are not in charge of other countries’ entry requirements. Some will have more restrictive vaccine rules than others. It only makes sense for our federal government to make navigating international travel as easy as possible for Canadians.

On Friday, the Ontario government is set to announce a further framework for their re-openings. This is good news. We should celebrate the fact that, in Ontario at least, the much anticipated fourth wave failed to launch and vaccination rates are exceedingly high.

As for Alberta, the worst of the latest wave appears to be receding, while vaccination rates continue to rise.

Provincial and federal COVID-19 policies need to be about moving forwards, not backwards. We owe ourselves that much.