By The Canadian Press
WINNIPEG — The Manitoba government is adopting a new COVID-19 response that allows restrictions to be imposed on specific communities, business sectors, or even individual schools or restaurants.
Until now, the government has enacted rules provincewide on such things as store openings and size limits on public gatherings.
The new approach uses colour codes so that rules can be applied to specific areas where COVID-19 numbers spike.
Yellow — or “caution” — denotes the current situation, which includes caps on public gatherings of 50 people indoors and 100 outdoors.
A community or facility where the pandemic is more problematic could be designated Orange, which means “restricted,” or Red, which signifies “critical.”
Those designations carry more restrictions.
Chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin says the “critical” designation is already being applied to a personal care home in Steinbach where a COVID-19 outbreak has been declared.
Roussin says many factors will go into deciding whether to change code colours, such as the rate of positive tests, the level of community transmission and the capacity of the health-care system.
Manitoba Pandemic Response System by ChrisDca on Scribd
