Editor:
Re: Point Roberts: we have yet to recover (Optimist, letters, Nov. 2).
No doubt Point Roberts businesses have suffered due to the pandemic, as have businesses in B.C. and beyond. An exemption regarding cross-border travel between Point Roberts and B.C. probably should be in place. And I can believe that more harm was done to Point Roberts by the restrictions than by the coronavirus, but I would suggest that was because the community was lucky: the isolation that hurt businesses probably prevented illness and perhaps death.
I am troubled by the phrases “medically panic-induced reaction” and “knee jerk panic response.”
We should not forget our situation in March 2020: we faced a new, highly-infective fatal disease with no protection other than avoidance, which meant distancing, even isolation for the more vulnerable. People were dying; I lost a friend here in Ladner. (Ultimately over 5,400 deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 in B.C., 10 times that number in Canada, over a million in the USA, and so on.) What were government health authorities supposed to do?
As much as I sympathise with all those who suffered because of the restrictions, I am personally glad they were put in place, along with the vaccination and mask mandates. I am confident that these saved countless lives. And could we reasonably expect governments to perform perfectly as they faced a disease about which we knew virtually nothing? I think that in the situation Canadian governments did at least as well as any in the world.
It is easy, now that we have the vaccines, knowledge about masks, etc., to get angry about the down-side of protective measures, but let’s not allow this to be the dominant factor when we face the next pandemic: the priority has to be the saving of lives.
Howard Solverson
