The hiring of a new chief medical officer of health for the Yukon is ushering in a new era and a new approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tracy-Anne McPhee, the minister of Health and Social Services, introduced Dr. Sudit Ranade during a COVID-19 briefing Wednesday afternoon. It was the first such event in several months.

The big news was that Ranade is recommending the lifting of the remaining COVID-19 vaccine mandates on public workers in such high-risk settings as hospitals and congregate living centres, such as group homes and shelters.

That still has to be approved by cabinet, McPhee said, and will take effect immediately after that decision. No timeline has been set.

The government first introduced vaccine mandates for all of its public workers last fall as the territorial state of emergency was reinstated as COVID-19 cases surged.

Implementing it was delayed until the winter months to provide the workers a chance to become fully immunized.

The main part of the mandate was lifted on Apr. 4 of this year, but it continued for workers in what the government called “high-risk settings”.

Ranade said he is also changing the territory’s COVID-19 Dashboard service on the Internet to weekly updates rather than daily.

Eventually, he will adjust that to monthly updates unless something urgent happens.

He said it’s time to move on from the approach needed to manage the acute phase of the pandemic to its endemic stage.

Ranade said he’s more concerned about the severity of symptoms now rather than absolute numbers. That’s why the changes are coming.

“What kind of disease they cause is more important than the numbers,” Ranade said.

He also suggested the public shouldn’t pay too much attention to statistics such as the testing positivity rate – which has been very high in recent days.

Ranade suggested that testing restrictions make that number of less significance and reliability than it could be currently.

“That number is going to fluctuate,” he said.

The official numbers posted after the briefing show COVID-19 cases are continuing to spike in the Yukon.

There were 28 active cases as of Wednesday afternoon, with 13 new cases.

The testing positivity rate was 47.9 per cent. Earlier this week, it was more than 51 per cent. One additional person has been hospitalized.

Likewise, McPhee mentioned it’s time to starting treating COVID-19 more like other respiratory diseases.

That will require a cultural shift, he said, that will take some time to accomplish for the general public.

“We will continue to monitor the situation closely with respect to COVID-19 so that we can scale our response as needed in terms of the vaccine mandates,” Ranade said.

All adults are now eligible for the second booster or fourth shots, and both Ranade and McPhee stressed it’s important to remain up-to-date on vaccines.

There are signs the new sub-variants of Omicron are in the territory, but neither Ranade nor McPhee provided any numbers Wednesday.

Ranade also said he wasn’t convinced that waste-water testing is a useful tool.

That’s in accordance with long-standing Yukon policy. It’s one of only two jurisdictions in Canada not to have done trials at the government level.

The village of Haines Junction and the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations are partnering with Public Health Canada on a joint pilot program to track COVID-19 signals in the wastewater in the communities.