Baby steps.
That’s what we’re taking as we try to figure out how to resume activities in the COVID-19 world.
Most of the restaurants in the city are now open again with seating restrictions. Most stores have opened, some requiring masks be worn, some not.
And now, as we move into September, some of the biggest baby steps are being taken.
The Kin Centres opened a few weeks ago, and there don’t appear to have been any problems there. The Aquatic Centre opened Tuesday and we’ll see how that goes.
Schools open tomorrow, and there are still a lot of parents with questions about how it’s going to work. The thing people have to realize is COVID-19 reopening does not come with a full instruction book with all the answers.
There are going to be questions cropping up over the next few days, weeks and months that had not been considered in the planning for a return. It’s not because the people with the city or the school district thought of them and ignored them; it’s because they just never came up.
Some of them will be relatively easy to answer, simply needing a minor tweak to one of the policies already in place. Others may require a more intensive study to determine the best answer.
The good news about these baby steps is most of them will be providing answers for other groups to build on when it’s their turn to reopen.
I spoke in the past few weeks on the After Nine show on CFIS with both Wade Loukes and Jim Worthington from the city. Wade is in charge of the Kin Centre; Jim is in charge of the Aquatic Centre.
Both of their reopening plans had a lot of similarities, which I’m sure is something you will find if you travel from place to place inside B.C. (not that I’m recommending that).
Both of them had spent a lot of time speaking with people in similar positions in other cities in the province, but both had to sign off on unique reopening plans, because no two facilities have exactly the same circumstances.
The same is true of the school district as it prepares to open the doors of the schools, including the new Shas Ti Secondary Kelly Road Secondary, tomorrow. They have done as much research as possible on something nobody has any first-hand experience with.
Baby steps. We need to take them before we can even think about running things the way they used to be.