Most Canadian provincial governments have ended their facemask mandates for hospitals.
Why mask mandates are lifting in hospitals across Canada | CBC News - Adam Miller:
April 15, 2023 - "Mask mandates are lifting in hospitals, long-term care homes and other health-care facilities across the country, marking an end to some of the last remaining public health restrictions against COVID-19 in Canada. British Columbia and Saskatchewan are the latest provinces to lift universal mask mandates in health-care settings, while most other provinces have either previously removed them, left them up to individual hospitals to decide, or will likely soon follow suit....
"'Clearly masks are important in health-care settings, we've used them always, and I've been a big supporter of mask wearing when it's appropriate,' Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C. provincial health officer and chair of the council of chief medical officers of health, told CBC News. 'Nobody is telling you not to wear a mask, what we're saying is it's no longer mandatory by a provincial health officer order that everybody do it all the time.'
"Canadians can expect many areas of hospitals to still encourage masking in emergency rooms and departments with particularly vulnerable patients, like burn units and cancer wards — and health-care workers will still likely wear them in many patient-facing settings. 'If you want to or your provider wants to, masks will certainly be available. So I think it's going to be a gradual transition,' Dr. Saqib Shahab, Saskatchewan's chief medical health officer, told CBC Saskatchewan last week....
"Part of the reasoning behind the shift in policy is to remove the need for health-care workers, who have faced severe burnout throughout the pandemic, to constantly mask in every area of the hospital — while also still allowing them the freedom to continue to do so.... Dr. Alon Vaisman, an infection control physician at Toronto's University Health Network (UHN) and assistant medical professor at the University of Toronto, said removing universal mask mandates in all health-care settings would likely help to ease health-care worker burnout....
"Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, said hospitals should be able to independently set policies on masking depending on local COVID levels and expert advice. 'When you're talking about non-patient facing activities, I don't think that there's much benefit in having masks in place, he said. 'There is benefit in patient-facing activities to having people wear masks, but I think it's something that each hospital needs to make a determination on based on the local metrics and not really something for the government to necessarily be involved in.'
"Alberta is still requiring masks in patient-facing settings, Quebec and Ontario are leaving masking rules up to individual hospitals, while Manitoba has opted to still require masks in health-care settings for the time being....
"Canada avoided a severe winter COVID-19 wave despite a lack of most of public health restrictions, a busy indoor holiday season and a rapidly mutating virus — largely thanks to high levels of hybrid immunity from vaccination and prior infection.... But COVID hospitalization levels still remain stubbornly high in Canada, with 3,268 hospital beds occupied by COVID patients across the country according to the latest federal data, despite continuing to gradually decline since mid-January."
Read more https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/mask-mandates-canada-hospitals-long-term-care-1.6811240
COVID-19 mask mandates dropped in more hospitals | CBC News, April 15, 2023:
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