The days of public health orders, such as the vaccine passport, and mask mandate, are gone at B.C. restaurants, bars, and other non-essential services.
At the Bard and Banker, general manager Demian Merino said it’s been tough.
“It’s been a pretty trying two years all in all with everything, the masks, the passports, the plexiglass to everything,” Merino said. “This last piece of the puzzle to be lifted is fantastic for us.”
After two years of ups and downs, business is booming on a Friday afternoon.
And Merino says people are ready to lose the vaccine passport requirement to get in.
“We’ve had a lot of people call over the last couple of days asking if we will be requiring them still,” Merino said. “And they’ve been very happy to hear that we are not.”
But life for Sally Kimpson won’t be going back to normal anytime soon.
She’s one of thousands in B.C. diagnosed as clinically extremely vulnerable.
“We’re sitting ducks actually, because now if I go to a restaurant, which I won’t be doing I don’t know if the person sitting next to me without the mask has been vaccinated or not,” Kimpson said.
Kimpson says it’s too risky for her to go out, and doesn’t understand why all the measures are dropped.
“I can’t figure out what is so irksome about wearing a mask for a couple of hours, or showing a vaccine passport. Like why is that such a problem? I just don’t understand it,” she said.
Kimpson is worried about being near unvaccinated people if she does go out in public.
“They are more infectious than those who are vaccinated. And so I would be exposed to those people even if I was wearing a mask and the mask is only one barrier, an effective one, but not completely 100 per cent,” Kimpson said.
For now, all public health measures related to the pandemic are gone in B.C., except the vaccine passport to visit long-term care facilities and hospitals.
READ MORE: B.C. moves to weekly COVID 19 reporting, changes how deaths are counted
Mary Griffin
