OLDS — Coun. Mary Jane Harper has joined the chorus of Albertans who’ve been calling for a regional approach to COVID-19 restrictions.
Harper made that suggestion to Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills MLA Nathan Cooper as he joined in a Zoom council meeting earlier this month.
Harper said measures to try to keep the COVID-19 virus from spreading are “very restrictive for our small community” and asked if Alberta Health Services (AHS) has looked at implementing restriction on a more on a regional basis.
She said the restrictions are especially tough for restaurants, making it “very difficult for those restaurants to even make a dollar.”
Cooper noted that rural communities tend to have fewer COVID cases.
He said he has consistently advocated for a regional approach to COVID restrictions, especially in the case of restaurants in smaller communities like Olds because conditions are different than they are in big urban centres.
“You know, you can’t Skip The Dishes to Reed Ranch, for example. So that’s sort of where that’s at and the work that I continue to do on that file," Cooper said.
The problem, he indicated, is that AHS is a provincewide health-care system so it addresses health care on that basis, rather than a regional one.
Through Cooper, Mayor Michael Muzychka thanked the provincial government for its decision to tie the relaxation of COVID restrictions to the number of people being hospitalized. The fewer the people hospitalized with COVID, the more restrictions will be loosened.
That said, he too joined the call to relax COVID restrictions on a regional basis.
“Give us a little more leeway to reward our citizens for doing the hard work that maybe some of the bigger centres -- the populations there – aren't doing,” Muzychka said.
