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An RCMP officer speaks with a motorist at a COVID-19 travel checkpoint on the Trans-Canada Highway north of Boston Bar, B.C., on May 7, 2021.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press

Across the country, the numbers are getting better. Some provinces are dealing with spikes in cases, but most are wrestling their third-wave surges under control. The national seven-day average count of new cases has fallen steadily for weeks, and hospitalizations are starting to follow suit or are at least stable.

Meanwhile, the number of people getting a first or (far more rarely) second dose of a vaccine climbs noticeably every day. Ontario, for instance, has now given a first dose to more than half its adult population.

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Given the steady rollout of vaccines scheduled for this month and next, and Canadians’ commendable eagerness to sign up and line up for a shot, it’s reasonable to hope that a modest version of normalcy will return to most of the country this summer.

And yet that’s not even the best news. The most promising development so far in May is the evidence that provincial governments may have finally learned their hard-earned lessons and are trying not to repeat their past mistakes – mistakes that could quickly undercut all the current progress in the fight against COVID-19.

In Alberta, which long resisted the need for tough measures and consequently became a North American COVID-19 hot spot, the Kenney government last week moved schooling online and ordered the closing of restaurants and bars – highly contentious decisions in a province with a militant anti-lockdown movement, but the only thing to do.

In Ontario, where the Ford government moved too quickly in March to lift its stay-at-home order in hard-hit Toronto and Peel Region, the province has extended its latest, provincewide stay-at-home order beyond its original May 5 deadline to May 20.

And this week, the province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, David Williams, went further. He said the order will not end on an arbitrary, preset date, but will continue until Ontario’s daily case count falls well below 1,000. (On Wednesday, Ontario reported 2,320 new cases.)

Dr. Williams didn’t give a precise figure for what it would take for him to recommend a reopening, and the Ford government has said the lockdown will likely continue into June.

Ontario has learned the hard way that it takes more than a downward trend in case counts and hospitalizations to lift restrictions in a sustainable fashion, especially when variants of concern are the dominant source of new infections, as appears to be the case in the province.

Nova Scotia has known this from the start. Along with the other Atlantic provinces, it has kept case counts remarkably low throughout the pandemic by implementing and strictly enforcing border controls, quarantines for travellers and lockdown measures when needed.

For the most part, Nova Scotians have been living a life of relative normalcy. But the province did not hesitate to bring back its strictest measures in late April after a variant of concern caused cases to jump by 63 in a day, a relatively low number by the standards of every province outside the region.

Tough measures work, but they need time and space to do so. Relenting on them too quickly, just because numbers were trending favourably, has been the reason so many provinces have yo-yoed between lockdown and reopening since the second wave of the pandemic hit last fall.

The lesson that hopefully has been learned in Canada is that winning the fight against the pandemic is not simply a matter of tightening and easing restrictions based on case counts and hospitalizations. Vaccination rates, and the presence of variants of concern in the population, are just as important factors in making such decisions.

In Britain, where a successful vaccination campaign has dramatically reduced case counts, public-health experts are warning that a planned easing of restrictions on May 17 might have to be postponed. Cases involving a new variant of concern first detected in India are doubling every week, and not enough is known about its resistance to vaccines.

Canada is in a good place right now. It’s becoming likely that everyone who wants one will have had at least a first dose of vaccine by Canada Day, and that new infections and hospitalizations will be much lower, too.

But these factors cannot be the only ones that determine when the provinces lift restrictions. You can only make the same mistake so often before it starts to look like you don’t know what you’re doing.

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