On July 28, provincial chief medical health officer Dr. Deena Hinshaw provided her first live COVID-19 update in weeks, providing details regarding Alberta’s next steps in the fight against the virus.
Hinshaw did not disappoint – at least in terms of shock value.
We here at the Rocky View Weekly newsroom were somewhat surprised at the direction the Province has decided to take regarding Alberta’s COVID-19 response. According to Hinshaw, it’s now time to handle COVID-19 like any other respiratory virus, which basically means going back to what life was like prior to the pandemic as of mid-August.
The incoming removal of the mandatory mask mandate, isolation and quarantining requirements, and asymptomatic and close-contact testing in phases has us wondering what will happen next in Alberta.
Is there no concern for students returning to in-classroom learning in the fall? It didn’t take long last year for schools to fill with positive COVID-19 cases – and that was despite students needing to quarantine when they were close contacts of a positive case. With low vaccination rates among students due to continued ineligibility for the shots, one can’t help but think we may be headed in a troubling direction.
It should be mentioned that at some point, the show must go on and life eventually return completely to normal. But cases are clearly rising provincially, and large-scale events like the Calgary Stampede prove there is still room for COVID-19 and its troubling variants to spread.
Reading stories from other publications across the nation and in our own backyard, it appears with Hinshaw’s press conference, Alberta is the laughingstock of the country. Blake Murdoch, a senior research associate with the Health Law Institute and Globe and Mail contributor based in Edmonton, called Alberta’s new COVID-19 response “reckless and repugnant.”
It is indeed a bizarre time to be an Albertan. With the recent policy announcements from our provincial government, it will be interesting to see where we go from here.
