Open for Summer - Is it Possible We Will Stay Open?
471 days.
That is how much time elapsed between the first state of public health emergency declaration and the rescission of nearly all public health restrictions in our province. While the world’s eyes were focused on COVID-19 in the months preceding Alberta’s pandemic response, the time that residents have been required to change their lifestyle to flatten the curve has been significant. Although the virus still exists within our borders and we are not completely out of the woods at this time, many are expressing tremendous optimism as they begin to return to something resembling ‘normal’.
With that being said, the question now becomes a little clearer - are we ‘open for summer’ or are we open for good? While playing Nostradamus is a fool’s errand, we can take a look around to observe a variety of realities around the globe to perhaps get a glimpse of future prospects for our province.
Let’s take a look at what could happen over the next three months.
Will We Remain Restriction Free?
We will begin with an optimistic hypothetical by suggesting Alberta can absolutely remain free of most public health restrictions beyond summer. From a pure policy perspective, the province’s threshold for entering Stage 3 of re-opening required 70 per cent of Albertans to have received at least their first dose of a vaccine. Unlike Stages 1 and 2, there is no automatic hospitalization trigger for us to fall back on (although the province could re-introduce restrictions as required should we see another wave). Fortunately, the percentage of eligible Albertans receiving their second doses has been rising rapidly, sitting at 44.8 per cent at the time of writing.
There is also reason for optimism when examining the rollout of the current re-opening plan rolled out by the Government of Alberta and health officials. Since the province began loosening restrictions on June 1st when Stage 1 was triggered, we have dropped from 423 new cases to 37 on Canada Day with no real spikes in between. More importantly, we have seen declining hospitalization and ICU admission rates. Now, it is far too early to be able to identify trends related to Stage 3’s lifting of restrictions, but the last two stages have shown that an uptake in vaccines and continued vigilance has indeed worked as intended.
“Since the province began loosening restrictions on June 1st when Stage 1 was triggered, we have dropped from 423 new cases to 37 on Canada Day with no real spikes in between. More importantly, we have seen declining hospitalization and ICU admission rates.”
We can also look to other jurisdictions to see that it is absolutely possible to remain open safely as pandemic-related data continues to improve. Perhaps one of the best examples to look at is about 12,166 kilometres away in New Zealand. Before we continue, we will point out that no jurisdiction has reached what is being referred to as “COVID-zero”, but many are close.
The country was incredibly aggressive in their pandemic response, but they were able to reopen nearly entirely as of June 2020. While they have had some small spikes in cases since, they have not truly experienced additional waves. There are currently just under 30 active cases in the entire country. Part of their success was the total closure of their borders at the start, something Alberta has no control over as that is under the federal government’s jurisdiction. They also continued to encourage their people to physically distance when appropriate. According to The Economist’s “normalcy index”, a way to measure reopening progress, New Zealand ranks second in the world, only trailing behind Hong Kong.
As far as reopening plans to emulate, reaching a point where we can see New Zealand-like numbers is absolutely a goal that Alberta should endeavour to achieve.
Will We See a Fourth Wave
While we were subject to public health restrictions in our province, many pointed to jurisdictions like Texas as an example of a return to freedom in North America that Alberta could emulate. On March 2nd, Governor Greg Abbott lifted all the public health restrictions in the state, saying that the region had all the tools it needed to deal with the virus and get life back to normal for Texans. Back in May, Premier Jason Kenney had addressed why we could not simply erase restrictions as that state did.
He cited three reasons: there was a much higher level of immunity in Texas due to the number of infections they experienced, they received vaccines much sooner than our province, and that they had greater health care capacity than Alberta. Jurisdictions remain at different places in the fight against the pandemic, and it is important to be mindful of that when comparing the degree of restrictions in force at any given time.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at what has happened in Texas since March 2nd, 2021. Governor Abbott acknowledged that the threat of the pandemic has not yet evaporated but encouraged residents to accept personal responsibility for their own health going forward.
“Today's announcement does not abandon safe practices that Texans have mastered over the past year. Instead, it is a reminder that each person has a role to play in their own personal safety and the safety of others. With this executive order, we are ensuring that all businesses and families in Texas have the freedom to determine their own destiny.” Sound familiar? If not for the reference to Texans, one could be forgiven for mistaking this quote as being uttered by Premier Jason Kenney or Health Minister Tyler Shandro.
When restrictions were lifted on March 2nd, the state recorded 190,390 active cases and 6,871 new cases (about 0.65 and 0.024 per cent of the state’s total population). For comparison’s sake, Alberta had 895 active cases and 37 new cases when we reopened on Canada Day (0.02 and 0.0008 per cent of the province’s total population). When comparing apples to apples, the province appears to be well suited to remain open beyond the Labour Day weekend and into the fall.
Since reopening, Texas has not seen a third wave of COVID-19. While this is positive news, it is important to recognize the difference in the rate of case decline. The curve has looked more like a gentle slope rather than a cliff face like we’ve witnessed in New Zealand. The reason for this is we have seen very different approaches to pandemic response. While New Zealand has the benefit of being an island nation, they implemented incredibly strict lockdown measures that effectively shut most of the country down for about 5 weeks before slowly easing restrictions. Texas has looked incredibly similar to Alberta insofar as they have never ordered a full lockdown and have prioritized keeping businesses open in restricted fashion to attempt to balance economic and public health.
The two jurisdictions have had very different experiences, but they are perhaps the two best examples to look at for what our future may hold. New Zealand’s population only slightly eclipses Alberta’s while Texas has employed an incredibly similar public policy approach to the public health crisis.
So, What is In-Store for Alberta?
As usual, this is where I will insert my ‘I am not an epidemiologist or virologist who is capable of predicting the future of a pandemic’ disclaimer. This is especially true of the Delta variant variable in this equation that we do not know a great deal about at the time of writing. With that said, we do have comparable jurisdictions that are ahead in their timeline of pandemic recovery than our province is. While it is by no means a perfect predictor, we will work with what we have available to us.
Had Alberta locked down as New Zealand did (make no mistake, Alberta never locked down relatively speaking), perhaps our curve would have looked similar and we would have reopened much sooner. Since Texas has followed a similar policy approach, we can somewhat safely look at that jurisdiction to see what our future may hold. Given what we have examined here, we might expect Alberta to continue to see a slow decline in COVID-19 cases rather than a steep drop. With that said, our province did reopen at a much safer time than our southern comparator. If Alberta can increase the number of vaccines in arms, continue to mitigate personal risk, and effectively prevent a Delta spike, we have some reason to remain cautiously optimistic.
