Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry

Image Credit: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

The message that we’re going to be in the COVID-19 lockdown for weeks or months keeps getting repeated during Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry’s daily updates.

She doesn’t yet have a plan on what getting out of the current lockdown situation looks like but hopes to shed some light on that as early as next week, she said today, April 7, in response to a question from iNFOnews.ca.

“Those plans and the conditions are still being worked out,” she said. “There are many, many details to them. I am not able to tell you what the plan is at the moment.”

She is watching what’s happening in other countries, such as Singapore, where restrictions were eased then had to be re-imposed as the number of cases started climbing again.

“We’re in for a bit of a ride on this,” Henry said. “It’s not going to be able to go back 100 per cent to where we were at in January or at Christmastime where we were able to celebrate and come together.

That kind of easing of restrictions won’t happen, she said, until there is a vaccine or “until we have enough people in the population that are immune to this - which we absolutely don’t want to happen all at once because that means the number of people getting sick and the overwhelming of the health care system.”

So, the focus is on stopping the spread of cases but, as in the past, she continued to hope for some relaxing of restrictions in the summer.

“We will have a period of time where this, hopefully, will wane and we will be stepping up and allowing us to go back to some of the activities that we’ve been doing (before),” Henry said. “Then we need to monitor very carefully and, if we start to see transmission in the community again, particularly as we go into the fall, we’ll need to look at the measures that are most important that help to reduce those changes in transmission again.”

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