Repealing mask bylaw would be unwise

By Letter to the Editor on June 18, 2021.

Editor:
The proposal that the City of Lethbridge, or any other municipality for that matter, should repeal its temporary mask bylaw simply because the province reaches its defined vaccination threshold and repeals its masking requirement, would be a bad public policy decision. Such a decision must not take place in a geographically uniformed vacuum; it must take account of local circumstances. The application of some basic geographic reasoning shows why this is the case.
To explain, Alberta is Canada’s fourth largest province geographically, with a total area (land and freshwater) of 661,848 km2.
That’s a large area, larger in fact than the Maritimes and Newfoundland and Labrador combined. And with that large size there comes a great deal of regional variability.
Consequently, just because the province as whole reaches a defined threshold with respect to, say, vaccination rates, it does not mean that all parts of the province will have reached that level.
The measures that the Province has deemed important relative to moving from Stage 2 to Stage 3, will not be the same in all parts of the province.
To get a handle on things, and to make decisions defined in terms of local conditions, we need to map various types of data to reveal spatial patterns and spatial variability. When we look at the numbers through that most basic of geographic tools – the map – we will almost certainly find that some parts of the province will have exceeded various targets, maybe even by large margins, but we will also see that some areas are lagging for various reasons.
Public-health measures such as masking and social distancing requirements have been effective, so it would be unwise to prematurely lift such measures in lagging regions simply because the Province in total has reached some level. Doing so would involve ignoring a most fundamental geographic concept, namely, spatial variability.
The province has all kinds of information related to COVID-19, as it should. Indeed, a good deal of that data, much of it geographically referenced, is also publicly available. There is no reason for public officials at any level of government to be unacquainted with this data, or fail to use it thoughtfully when making critically important policy decisions. Thinking geographically and recognizing that provincial-scale trends may not be mirrored at the local level, adds an additional layer of nuance to that assessment.
Tom Johnston, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Geography and Environment
University of Lethbridge