First the bad news. British Columbia will not advance to Step 4 of its reopening from COVID-19 restrictions next month as we’d all hoped. There are simply too many new positive cases each day.
The good news is, those who have needlessly prolonged the pandemic by failing to get vaccinated will soon find themselves excluded from restaurants, theatres, gyms and other indoor activities.
These are stern measures but they have our 100 per cent support. As of Monday, a quarter of all eligible British Columbians had not yet received both shots, despite them being widely available on demand. The latest stats show 87 per cent of new infections are in the unvaccinated and of the 133 folks in hospital with COVID, 89 per cent haven’t had both doses. With the arrival of the Delta variant, the stakes have been raised and there are still hundreds of thousands of children under 12 relying on the rest of us to protect them.
The benefits of the B.C. Vaccine Card are two-fold. It should persuade a lot of fence-sitters to do the right thing and go get their shot, which is great. We’d love to have them at the table. Of course, there will still be holdouts but the rest of us will breathe a little easier knowing they won’t be seated at the table next to us.
And we don’t have a minute in our day for those who whine that the vaccine card infringes on their civil liberties. We’ve all experienced that over the last 18 months. Too much has been lost – in our lives, in our mental health and in our economy – to let anti-vaxxers drag this out any longer.
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