Allow more freedom for elderly in vaccine

We need more nuanced policy-making as vaccination campaigns evolve. An example is the many congregate care settings which now constitute vaccinated bubbles. These are microcosms of the world we'll have when the majority of our population is vaccinated. Nonsensically, there is no adjustment to the restrictions happening in these settings.

One staff member tests positive in a retirement residence in which all residents have been fully vaccinated and the residents are sent back to their rooms to languish and decline in isolation. Again. They're familiar with this routine, but they don't understand why it continues now that they are all vaccinated. Who can blame them? The residence is forced to apply static public health directives to “minimize interactions between residents” even now that there is no risk of infection between them.

My mother is one of those suffering from this failure to adjust broad-brush restrictions. In addition to residents, most employees in her setting have been vaccinated. I wish the provincial government would make it easier for the remainder to be vaccinated, by implementing sick pay and paid time for vaccination. But I am equally frustrated with government unresponsiveness to the new reality of vaccinated environments.

Before the current provincial lockdown, my mother could benefit from carefully controlled programming: one vaccinated staff member facilitating a discussion or gentle exercises between four vaccinated four seniors. With the lockdown, those small gatherings were eliminated. Now a staff member has tested positive and further restrictions are applied; the residents have to stay in their rooms. Even though they are vaccinated.

If we are all moving toward the goal of majority vaccination with a view to life being able return to some kind of normal, then why, in the first, controlled microcosms of that state, are we still isolating people — some of the most vulnerable in society — who have had their vaccines? Jennifer Henderson, Ottawa