It started last Friday with the city’s golf courses. Mayor Mike Hurley predicts some of the city’s other outdoor facilities will be next. But the bigger challenge will be the indoor facilities – especially the library.
The City of Burnaby has struck a working group to figure out exactly how the city should open up as provincial and federal governments ease up restrictions related to COVID-19.
“Given that social distancing, physical distancing is going to be with us for a little while, what is all that going to look like?” Hurley said of the main issue the group is working to determine.
Governments across Canada are all faced with the same elusive question: how do we open up our communities and our economies to resume some functions of our society without risking another spike in COVID-19 cases?
Buy-in for physical distancing in B.C. and around Canada has generally been pretty high, with provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry often praising B.C. residents for their efforts.
But it’s not clear how long that will continue, as bills still need to be paid and small businesses struggle to stay afloat long enough to weather the storm – not to mention the accumulating impacts of distancing on physical and mental health.
We know the current level of physical distancing is working – the oft-mentioned curve is flattening both provincially and nationally, as both Henry and federal chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam have noted.
What we don’t know is how much those restrictions can be safely relaxed, meaning governments will be engaging in some trial and error.
“The outside spaces will probably be the first to get going,” Hurley said. “I think everything’s going to happen in two-week intervals, and then we’ll look and see if it’s made a difference on the medical side and go from there.”
For instance, if there’s been no discernible uptick of COVID-19 cases in Burnaby by mid-May, the move to open golf courses will likely go unchanged – and the city will likely start looking at the next facilities to open, whether it’s soccer fields or some other outdoor facilities.
But if that does happen, don’t expect it to be business as usual at those facilities. When the golf courses opened up on May 1, it came with a slew of new rules, including no contact with staff, longer intervals between tee times and no hanging around the course after finishing.
Indoor facilities, where air is recirculated and there’s no breeze to disperse potentially coronavirus-carrying water droplets, will be the true test, however.
“People are anxious to get back to going to their community centres. A lot of people relied on those for … reaching out and being part of the community. We’re as anxious as anyone else to get them up and running, but we have to do it in a really (carefully) guided way,” Hurley said.
“The library’s going to be the real challenge, I think, because there’s so many touch points.”
