The federal government announced on Monday that COVID travel restrictions will expire on Saturday.
Zahid Butt is an assistant professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Waterloo. He explained why the government might have made the decision.
"They are not seeing a lot of change in domestic levels of COVID-19," said Butt. "They're not seeing new variants coming in, or making a change to whatever variants are already in Canada."
One of the changes will be allowing unvaccinated international travellers into Canada. However, it will not be easy to determine if they are spreading COVID while coming into the country.
"Since there won't be any more tests of travellers, it's very difficult to really say how much of the infections in the future will be from travellers," said Butt.
Testing, and contact tracing has decreased over the course of the pandemic. Testing especially is necessary to determine how the virus is spreading in the future.
The government said it could bring back restrictions if necessary. However, without more testing, they will have to turn to other ways to determine whether to reinstate requirements.
"One of the indicators is trying to look at how many of the hospitalizations are due to COVID-19, and how many ICU admissions are due to COVID-19," Butt said. "If they see an uptake in these two indicators, then they might bring back restrictions."
Butt added that with restrictions dropping, the government has shifted the responsibility to the public to determine how they want to protect themselves. His recommendation was for individuals to receive the new COVID-19 bivalent vaccine.
"People should be going and getting those booster doses to boost their immunity," said Butt. "Especially, since now all the restrictions have been raised. Now, you don't have a masking, a vaccine mandate. I think the message here is to go and get yourself the booster vaccination that is out there."
