'Weigh your own risk' will be Quebec's motto this spring as masks become optional: Boileau

Quebec's plan for the spring is to take things slowly and, stresses the province's public health chief, to make space for people to weigh their own risks.

"We're not recommending not to wear [a mask]. We're recommending to no longer make it obligatory," said Dr. Luc Boileau in a press conference Thursday.

Masks are still "a very effective measure" for safety, he said. However, the province wants personal choice to play a bigger role this spring.

On Wednesday, the province announced it plans to roll back the mask requirement for adults in public spaces as of mid-April, though no exact date has been set yet.

At the same time, it said it was moving up the date to stop requiring the vax passport by two days, to March 12. Restaurants and stores will be back to full capacity as of then.

The news brought "a good dose of optimism," said Boileau, and it's well-earned since all COVID-19 indicators have been dropping for weeks, including hospitalizations and children's absences from school.

It's even possible the change could come in late March, he said.

However, he said the province wants to wait about two weeks after students return from March Break this coming Monday to keep tabs on any possible resurgence of the virus. 

Afterwards, if all goes well, it will take "a progressive approach" and work in stages, Boileau said, as people begin to weigh the many factors that will help them decide when and where to continue masking.

It will first relax the rules around masks in public, then removing masks on public transit. That will take place likely "in May, but probably not before the begining of May," Boileau said.

The province wants to wait longer to take the step on transit since people can be more crowded in that setting and have less control over their risk.

Masks are staying for now in hospitals, long-term care homes and other care settings, Boileau said, since those are environments with much more vulnerable people.

WHAT ABOUT THE IMMUNOCOMPROMISED?

He said the new phase will likely involve a lot of people making day-by-day, and situation-by-situation, decisions about when to put a mask on.

There isn't an "enormous risk," for example, in an elevator, he said, but people who find themselves in any close contact with others will all need to decide what they feel comfortable with.

He said that people with serious medical conditions will also likely continue to wear masks, especially as others' come off.

"Of course, for some persons that are patients with cancer or very complicated diseases impacting their immune system, they might decide to continue to wear it or not [if they're] in a crowd where there are a lot of persons that aren't wearing it," he said.

When asked how he can say that Quebecers will all return more to a normal life, given these immunocompromised people who could be at more risk with everyone unmasked around them, Boileau said it's "impossible to ask a population of 8.5 million" to continue to mask indefinitely for a small minority, but that the province has a slew of other tools that will help the medically vulnerable.

For example, these patients will get a fourth vaccine dose, and everyone in medical settings will still wear masks, he said. The province also now has Paxlovid, the medication that can treat COVID-19.

And a new variant arrives and makes it necessary to bring back mandatory masks? People will be willing to comply again if the government has "credibility," Boileau said, even if not masking has become normalized again.

In that eventuality, "we will have to explain it really well and make sure that the people that are at risk will wear it, and that people that would like to protect them... will be also kind enough to wear it," he said.

SCIENTIFIC CREDIBILITY AFTER CURFEW QUESTIONS

When asked about Wednesday's other revelation -- that public health officials were scrambling for scientific justification for bringing back a curfew in late December, hours before announcing it to the public -- Boileau said he wasn't responsible for that.

"The decision to be taking about the curfew was taken by... the person that preceded me," he said, referring to Dr. Horacio Arruda.

• READ MORE: As Quebecers were questioning if curfews worked, so were health officials, emails show

But he skirted around the question of whether he would have done the same in Arruda's shoes.

The studies the government ended up citing to justify the curfew, from France and Jordan, all had limitations, and otherwise it was relying on "observational" information, the healthy ministry said.

"I do not think that I could say that he was not well informed... and that his intentions were not the best," Boileau said of Arruda.

Boileau was also a top health official himself at the time, leading the National Institute of Clinical Excellence, where his primary responsibility was monitoring the situation in hospitals.

Curfew is "a recommendation that is certainly affecting the liberty of the citizens, but this was related [to] scientific data... from the measures that have been experienced before inside our own context  [and] compared to other cities," he said.

"I think it's a recommendation that is a very, very difficult recommendation to make."

LISTEN ON CJAD 800 RADIO: Mask or no mask? Dr. Mitch Shulman with his advice