British Columbia Won’t Drop Restrictions Despite Low Hospitalizations – What’s Going On?

The NDP provincial government of British Columbia, headed by Premier John Horgan, is one of very few provinces left in Canada that is resisting the return to normal, and there is a lack of medical evidence to suggest why they are still delaying. In fact, the evidence suggests they should have dropped their COVID-19 mandates and restrictions a long time go. 

Government restrictions to combat COVID have proved to be wildly ineffective the BC government, like every other provincial government, is convinced they work. But even if we are to assume they do work for the sake of argument, BC is still refusing to drop restrictions in the face of falling COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations. 

Back in early January BC was experiencing thousands to tens of thousands of new cases per day (mostly Omicron) but now in early March BC is only seeing hundreds of new cases per day.

The BC Centre for Disease Control currently only lists 511 people in hospital and 79 in ICU with COVID, which is low for a province with a population of over 5 million.

A smaller province like Alberta at times had more than double the patients in ICU and even then Alberta was not in significant danger of having hospital resources stretched. The Alberta Health Service (AHS) even had to admit their ICU numbers were skewed higher due to widespread misreporting. 

The BC Health Authority cannot justify their lack of movement towards removing restrictions based on bad experiencing with hospitals being overwhelmed in the previous two years of COVID-19. A freedom of information request showed that between the fiscal year of 2020-2021 hospitalizations were lower than they were in the previous five fiscal years. 

Although BC’s Chief Medical Officer Bonnie Henry has indicated that the province could drop some COVID-19 restrictions, Premier Horgan and the NDP government seem focused on showing up conservative premiers in other provinces by pretending to care more about the public health. 

The legacy media has definitely not been helping encourage British Columbians to drop restrictions as they are still dedicatedly covering every person who dies with COVID as a major story and reporting every time hospitalization numbers increase.

In 2019 the CBC would not be reporting on every little increase in occupied ICU beds, but they are still promoting a narrative that COVID could overwhelm hospitals at any moment, thus the obsessive coverage of COVID-9 hospital data.

So what’s going on in BC? Politics, probably.

It looks like John Horgan wants BC to be the California of Canada and remove restrictions last, but the BC government still has not explained why the rest of the world is going back to normal but somehow the situation in BC still justifies keeping ineffective, and unconstitutional, restrictions in place.

Sadly for BC residents, they are living in a province that seems to be keeping in place COVID-19 restrictions, and in some cases preventing people from working due to being unvaccinated, in order to make a cheap political point.