The pandemic is not over, but Manitoba has nonetheless decided to move on

Two years ago, Manitoba reported its first case of COVID-19.

About 126,000 official cases and who knows how many actual cases later, the province is doing its best to turn the page on the pandemic.

In three days, most of Manitoba's remaining pandemic restrictions will expire. That means no more mandatory quarantine for people who test positive for COVID and no more mask mandate for most indoor public places.

This is happening even though the Omicron variant continues to have a significant impact on the health and well-being of Manitobans.

As of Friday, there were 417 COVID patients still requiring care in Manitoba hospitals. And for the week ending Friday, the province was still announcing an average of three COVID deaths per day.

The chief provincial public health officer says even though COVID transmission remains something of a risk, it is time to move on.

"We've been at it for two years," Dr. Brent Roussin said earlier this week in an interview, opining Manitobans are exhausted by public health measures.

His office previously acknowledged it isn't sure what will happen next with COVID-19 transmission in Manitoba, though some uptick in cases is likely in the short term.

Roussin said he does not have any data to demonstrate it would be safer to eliminate a mask mandate one week later from now — or would have been advisable one week earlier.

"These are decisions that are that are tough and have been challenged on both sides and will continue to be challenged on both sides," he said.

The argument in favour of eliminating all remaining restrictions right now is not just economic. There are concerns about the mental health of Manitobans, mostly based on anecdotal reports.

One hard piece of evidence is available: Deaths attributed to overdoses of non-medical drugs were poised to reach a record high in 2021. 

On the other hand, the move to further relax restrictions is expected to slow the decline in COVID transmission. That means it may take longer for the COVID patient burden in Manitoba hospitals to decline.

That, in turn, will make it more difficult to return hospital staff who were seconded to COVID care to surgical and diagnostic units. And that could lead to more collateral deaths among patients waiting for those procedures.

Another argument against relaxing remaining restrictions now is this could shift the burden of the pandemic risk to Manitobans who are more susceptible to contracting COVID-19.

This is not a theory. Roussin is among public health leaders who say the relatively poor health of Manitobans overall was a significant factor in the province's COVID death rate, the second-highest in Canada through the first two years of the pandemic.

Winnipeg epidemiologist Souradet Shaw suggests Manitoba ought to be more cautious, especially given the lessons it learned earlier in the pandemic.

When the province lost control of COVID transmission during the second wave, seniors bore the brunt of COVID deaths. During the third wave, Indigenous people and newcomers were over-represented among people with COVID infections. 

"We knew the health status of our population prior to the pandemic hitting us," Shaw said earlier this week. "I think this should have been an argument for prioritizing the precautionary principle when it came to enacting protections, and to be more cautious in lifting them, when the waves subsided."

Learning to live with the virus while some are still dying

Manitoba is hardly alone in this respect. Many U.S. states rushed to eliminate pandemic restrictions last year, well before the arrival of the Omicron wave.

That left more vulnerable Americans — disproportionately people of colour, and overwhelmingly the less affluent — suffering from more severe COVID-19 outcomes.

The idea that ordinary people must "learn to live with the virus," as Premier Heather Stefanson has often stated, suggests pandemic management is moving from a collective responsibility to an individual one.

This phenomenon "shifts the burden to the very groups experiencing mass deaths to protect themselves, while absolving leaders from creating the conditions that would make those groups safe," University of Pennsylvania sociologist Courtney Boen told The Atlantic magazine earlier this month.

"It's a lot easier to say that we have to learn to live with COVID if you're not personally experiencing the ongoing loss of your family members."

This is not to suggest more affluent people don't care. Many of us simply appear to have become desensitized to the COVID-19 death counts that seemed so shocking at the start of the pandemic.

"We do all have this adaptive tendency in any situation where we face disruption, a threat to our health or a threat to our well-being to set a new baseline," said Dr. Jillian Horton, a Winnipeg internist who has been critical of Manitoba's pandemic response.

"Unequivocally, it's just harder for us to be shocked now as a society by those numbers," she said. "I'm not saying that that makes them any less shocking, but that makes them more acceptable."

The simple fact remains: It has only been six weeks since Manitoba reported the highest COVID hospitalization numbers of the pandemic and the second-highest daily death counts.

The pandemic is not over. It would be fair to say, however, that the collective effort to mitigate has been downloaded to ordinary people.

"This has been such a challenging two years for probably every Manitoban," Roussin said this week. "So now let's show some compassion to each other. Let's just try to move forward."