Three people sit at a picnic table next to their dome tent. There are trees and mountains in the background. It's a sunny day.

Photo Credit: Province of British Columbia / Flickr

BC Lifts Travel Restrictions as COVID Cases Drop

People were so excited to travel they crashed the BC Ferries website

The province says it’s okay to travel outside your regional health authority for fun now. This could be very good news for Vancouver Island. It means that folks from the mainland will be coming back, and that will really help tourism and small businesses that depend on visitors.

COVID-19 cases have dropped and about 75% of adults in the province have been vaccinated. The province says that that’s good enough to end some travel restrictions and let larger groups of people get together both outside and indoors.

The province announced a few weeks ago that if things were going well with COVID-19, they would relax travel restrictions on June 15.

While some folks booked ferry trips in advance, there were so many people trying to book tickets the night before the restrictions ended that they actually crashed the BC Ferries website.

BC Ferries says they’ll have hundreds of extra sailings by the end of June.

The province is saying that the next two weeks will be really important.

Now that we’re allowed to travel around, COVID-19 cases could go up a bit. But if the spread stays low, then we could see the end of even more restrictions as of July 1.

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