With several Canadian provinces set to lift mask mandates in the next few weeks, health experts say the timing is right for strict measures to be eased.
Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador have all set dates for the end of provincial mask mandates after national health officials said the peak of Omicron in Canada has passed.
Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, said that a province-by-province approach to lifting or reinstating pandemic measures is appropriate as Canada moves forward.
"Everyone's looking at the same data and coming up with different conclusions," Bogoch told CTV's Your Morning on Thursday.
Bogoch said "each province has its own epidemic" and has had to take slightly different protective measures pandemic based on its own epidemiology, its political and public health leadership, and the public buy-in.
"It's not unexpected – we've seen this time and time again – to see the different provinces take slightly different paths forward during the pandemic," he said, adding that Canada will eventually see the end of restrictive measures such as mask mandates "across the board."
Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti, an infectious diseases physician at Trillium Health Partners, told Â鶹ӰÊÓ Channel on Thursday he thinks the approaching easing of pandemic measures is safe.
"The time is absolutely right," he said. "Nobody is saying COVID is gone – we are going to be dealing with this in our field for a time to come – but it no longer needs to be the central focus of everybody's attention, and I think that this is going to be really good for us to get back to aspects of our lives that have been neglected for the past two years."
Chakrabarti also said the time is right to end vaccine passport schemes, as Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta all plan to do in the coming weeks.
"I think this passport could have been dropped way before," Chakrabarti said.
While the vaccine protects against serious illness, hospitalization and death, real-world evidence now shows that it does not specifically prevent against the transmission of COVID-19, Chakrabarti said, meaning that requiring a passport for entry into businesses and other spaces does not necessarily stop the virus from spreading.
"As such, there's really no scientific rationale for using it," Chakrabarti said.
He added that, after Canada's fifth wave that was dominated by the highly transmissible Omicron variant, "post-infectious immunity" is also likely higher in the community, providing further protection against serious illness.
But Bogoch said, even as things open back up, Canadians should expect some non-lockdown measures to return periodically as Canada learns to live with COVID-19.
While he said he hopes that Canada can avoid school closures and strict lockdowns moving forward, Bogoch cautions Canadians to expect periodic "soft measures" such as the return of mask mandates, in the event of future waves.
"We should think of public health measures as a dimmer switch, not an off and on switch," Bogoch said.
But as Canada moves forward, Bogoch said it will be important to reflect on the lessons learned from the past two years.
"We have to build up resilience here in Canada," he said. "We have to build up healthcare capacity and ensure that we have our various sectors of our country really prepared so that future waves don't impact us as significantly."
