Children as young as age five will soon be required to wear masks in all indoor public spaces, says the province’s top doctor.
Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry told CHEK News that she will next week revise her public health order on indoor masks for grocery stores, libraries, recreation centres and other indoor public spaces to align it with the new mask mandate in schools that now begins at kindergarten.
“We’ll revise it to age five,” Henry said in an interview Friday.
“We aligned it with what was going on in the schools to make it simple,” she added. “So it’s the same across the board.”
A full list of indoor public places subject to the mask mandate is available here.
B.C. had set the age at 12+ when it made masks mandatory in public spaces in late August. Earlier this week, it revised the ages downward to nine and up to better reflect the Grade 4 threshold for masks that had been set for schools. But now that masks in schools are required for all grades, the public mask age will be changed also to start at the age of kindergarten kids, she said.
Henry in the past had expressed worry that young children would fiddle with their masks or be uncomfortable wearing them for long periods of time. But she said early feedback has proven that’s not the case.
“I had more anxiety about it than the children I talked to,” she said.
“I think we’ve given them enough time to get used to it and in most schools, it’s going really well.”
Masks remain a “visible reminder” to people about the protections and safety required to prevent the spread of COVID-19, said Henry.
Although people may feel safer when wearing them, regular three-layer fabric masks worn by most people are not shown to be particularly effective in preventing the wearer from getting infected by COVID, but they are very effective in keeping infected people from spreading the virus by limiting the droplets that come out of their nose and mouth when speaking.
“They do provide some protection but primarily they keep your own droplets in and that’s the big thing,” said Henry.
READ MORE: B.C. extends school mask mandate to all students from K-12
Rob Shaw
