More Clarity On What Public Health Order Allows

signated that could enter a home and vice versa. They can't have a family back over at their house, it has to be the two people. We have to look at the spirit of the order. I think everyone gets the intent of the order. There's a lot of questions out there. I think some of the questions are related to how to almost skirt the order. The principle here is two people, they are designated, it's the same two people. I think it's very clear and I think Manitobans, in general, understand the spirit of it.

Why can't two parents bring their young children or babies over for a visit to Grandma and Grandpa?

Realistically that goes against the order and the spirit. We want to limit interactions. So if it's a parent and one child that goes and visits grandparents and they are the designated people, that's okay, that is the spirit of the order. Hence, those grandparents can visit the two parents and those two kids in the family of four home, in the home with the two parents and the two kids as well. Again, that is the spirit of the order. We would like that bubble concept. We want the same people interacting. We don't want a number of different households interacting. We won't want two people going to ten different homes on a regular basis. Keep it simple, this is important. We all need to do this, I need to do it, it's incumbent upon all of us to do this. We want to protect Manitobans, we want to keep our case counts down, we want to limit interactions, we need to limit interactions. And that's what it comes down to, that's the basic principle to prevent the spread of this virus, is limit those interactions.

Does it not make sense though that the family of four should be able to visit their grandparents' home if that is their bubble?

It's the way orders are written. It's hard to write words to correlate what we know we want to create in a safe way. It's easy to kind of say, it's two and you leave it at two. We understand, we recognize that there will be times where two people will visit four, and out of those four people only two of those could visit two. But it keeps it simple, which is what we want. We don't want confusion with the orders. We want to again limit those interactions and again the spirit of the order is to kind of create that bubble. It's hard to define that bubble and it's hard to enforce that as well, so I think we need to keep that in mind. So we want to keep this simple. So it is two and we understand the point that readers are making but I think in general the public understands that. We have to give people credit for all the work that they've done and they continue to understand that we need to mitigate risk and again I think people understand the orders and the spirit of the orders as well.

Did you at all consider what Atlantic Canada did in spring when they used a two household bubble so that two different households could interact with each other?

I don't know if other interventions were done in Atlantic Canada, I think Atlantic Canada had created their own Atlantic Canada bubble as well. It's hard to compare sometimes two provinces even, or two countries, or two different settings in relation to prevention. So different things work in different areas and obviously just because something worked one place, doesn't mean it's going to work someplace else for a number of different reasons. For the amount of virus circulating within a community or setting, test positivity as well, and the interactions, the ability for smaller households, let's say in a home. I don't know what the average number of people are in a home in Nova Scotia, and is that different in Manitoba? So all those things play a role and risk and we have to look at Manitoba's risk. We're looking at Manitoba solutions for Manitobans. And that's what we're trending toward, that's what we're doing and that's what we're going to continue to do.

What precautions should someone take when visiting another household?

The same precautions should be taken. Just because someone is coming to your home, doesn't mean you should be hugging them or kissing them. I think we need to understand again that risk. We understand that having two people over increases risk, we've talked about that before. But we also understand people need that physical connection as well, it's good to visit people. You still need to distance, wear that mask, wash your hands when you come into the house, use alcohol sanitizer in the home as well. It's still important to look at those non-pharmaceutical interventions, those things that we talk about every single day from a public health perspective. By allowing this, we're going to see how Manitobans are doing. It's incumbent upon us to interact in a manner where we're not transmitting the virus. Again, people might think the risk is low because this is my bubble. But again, you are interacting with someone, there is risk there. There is no zero-risk situation and if we put multiples on that. Again, it's not just you and your neighbour or you and your parents, it's everyone has a neighbour, everyone has a parent, everyone has a brother. So it's families that need to worry about this. We don't want our case counts to go up. We want to try to be able to open up more of society, but that's all going to be based upon what Manitobans do and how they interact, and how they behave.

Another one of the changes in the new public health order now allows barbershops and hairstylists to open at 25 per cent capacity with adequate physical distancing and requirements to collect information for contact tracing purposes.

What if a hair salon also offers waxing or nail services. Are those now allowed too?

We just can't open up everything at once and we understand that there's disappointment out there. We have to carefully select the things that we do want to open up, that society wants to open up as well. So we're looking at barbershops and hair salons, we're just thinking about haircuts on the scalp, hair on your head. We're not looking at waxing, we aren't looking at nails, that involves more interactions. This virus comes down to those interactions. The more people are out, the more that you do with others, the greater the risk. That one moment where you're doing something with someone, might not be that risky, we have 1.4 million people in Manitoba, multiply that by 1.4 million, multiply that every single day and becomes an exponential type of risk that occurs and that's what happened to us in the fall. If we had all those restrictions in place, we had guidelines in place for all the businesses and we still saw our case numbers rise. So we need to understand that and again, we are looking at the orders on a regular basis as well. So for this interim, for the next three weeks, this is where we've drawn the line and we're going to take another look at it obviously in three weeks time depending on all those other indicators we keep talking about, acute care capacity, testing, case and contact management, test positivity, total number of cases, different settings where virus is spreading as well.

Can hairstylists who operate out of their home, also open?

If they are a registered hairstylist, that's a barber or a hair salon, then they can provide that specific service.