The Government of Manitoba released a revised plan for phase four of a COVID-19 recovery, and it looked quite a bit different than the initial draft plans.
The initial plan for phase four lifted travel restrictions for travellers outside of western Canada, changes to indoor and outdoor gathering sizes, and walk up service at bars.
After receiving more than 24,000 responses to an online survey asking for opinions on the plans, the province has decided not to move forward with those aspects of reopening.
“You can't get five Manitobans to agree on which coffee they like at Tim Hortons but that said, you can see general trend lines you can see general themes emerge,” Health Minister Cameron Friensen said.
“From all of what we collected and glean from Manitobans both on the website, their questionnaires and on the telephone town hall. The number one area in which they expressed concern was the lifting of restrictions for travel from outside Manitoba.”
Still on the docket for July 25 is removing the need for sub-groups for faith/cultural based events, but maintaining a maximum of 30 per cent capacity and allowing performance venues, casinos and movie theatres to open at 30 per cent capacity. Changes to visiting procedures at personal care homes also remained in the plans.
Friesen compared health orders to speed limits, comparing them to dropping the speed limit on highways to 80 km/h.
“We wouldn't get compliance, because people would say, ‘well, that's an unreasonable rule. You can't make us drive 80 km/h on the highway,’” he said.
“I think in the same way here, you know, people have common sense. I think that the story of Manitoba has been that people complied. And why did they comply? Because they felt like the rules were fair, that they were unnecessary.”
Officials also announced they had detected only one new case of COVID-19 in the province on July 22. Despite a large uptick in cases throughout the province, no new cases have been detected in the Northern Health Region. Roussin said all but one of the new cases were related to clusters or travel.
Manitoba’s test positivity rate over the past five days has once again dropped to below one per cent. The province is tracking 49 active cases.
At least some of those clusters were inside Hutterite colonies, and Roussin warned against stigmatizing any population.
“We've seen a shifting stigma, you know, at first we saw a lot of stigma against Asian Canadians, we might see stigma against other groups and now we see stigma against the Hutterites for this and it's not useful - It's not appropriate,” provincial public health officer, Dr. Brent Roussin said.
“It actually hinders public health's ability to control this virus.”
In Saskatchewan news wasn’t as positive.
Over the past three days there have been 110 new cases of COVID-19 detected in the province. Saskatchewan is tracking over 200 active cases.
Unlike in Manitoba, the virus is present in the northern region of the province. Four new cases have been detected in the far north region according to Government data.
