I'm certainly not a communications expert, that's for sure. I will comment from the perspective of the science and the infectious disease point of view.
The engagement part is important. I think it was interesting.... We didn't try to manage the volunteers. Once there was that wave of engagement that was partially generated, there was an opportunity. We generated opportunities for people to be engaged, particularly through testing. Not just around testing, but also as part of the testing events, as it was the actual people doing swabs and doing the point of care tests. However, we didn't try to manage that.
It's important that there is sometimes a great deal of oversight—paternalism, maternalism or they-ism—that comes into our public health responses, in that we try to control it. It's a notifiable disease. We let go of that a bit. We let go of medical professionalism and protectionism of fields to include people in a very real way that was very much generated by them as well.
I think if we're going to be successful as we go forward in any province, we have to give people a bit of autonomy at the same time as we're telling them to restrict. I'm not a human behaviour specialist, but I think that was an important part of the combination of responses here in Nova Scotia. I hope that's going to continue.
To your point about speed, we can't do this if governments aren't definitive and quick. The speed at which you take away the restrictions should be as slow and guided by quantitative measures as the implementation should be swift. Taking things away too fast, before the numbers go down, is a catastrophe.
In terms of speed and communication to people, we just provided a whole lot of information to folks in a real way and said that this is the way it is.