New poll suggests majority of Canadians want COVID-19 restrictions to end

Like many of us, Bruce MacDonald is ready to see the pandemic end.

"I am certainly ready to say goodbye to it anytime,” said MacDonald.

We are now 23 months into the COVID-19 pandemic and Dr. Trevor Jain, an emergency room physician and disaster medicine specialist on Prince Edward Island, expects we will soon start to hear new messaging from public health officials.

"This disease, although we're still in a pandemic, is going to become endemic,” said Jain.

“You've started to see that with Dr. Bonnie Henry in British Columbia. She started to pave the way forward to say that we are going to treat this like other serious respiratory illnesses. So some people have took that and said, ‘Oh, we're going to treat it like the common cold.' Absolutely not. It's going to be treated like influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, other serious respiratory viruses."

As the pandemic lingers on, some are ready to ease public health measures.

"I enjoy going to restaurants and being social so that part of it is always tricky. Travelling is tricky, so yes. I'm definitely looking forward to getting back to a new normal,” said Josee Grace, who is visiting Nova Scotia from British Columbia.

According to a recent Angus Reid poll, in the last two weeks, the number of Canadians saying they would like to see restrictions end has risen by 15 percentage points, to an overall majority of 54 per cent. 

"As long as Dr. Strang says he wants restrictions, I'm going to go with him,” said MacDonald.

But as long as the Omicron wave is still a factor, people are encouraged to get vaccinated.

"The Omicron variant, the disease it causes is mild, but it doesn't mean that everyone will have a milder disease. Some people will progress to a severe disease, some people will unfortunately die from it as well,” said Dr. Zayid Butt, a physician and infectious disease epidemiologist in Waterloo, Ont.