The local paper had a report this morning about a long-term care facility in Richmond that had tested all its residents and staff for covid-19. The results were sobering. Approximately two-thirds of the tests came back positive. Perhaps more troubling, of the residents who tested positive, 58% were "asymptomatic carriers showing no signs of being ill." The administrator of the facility said the results were consistent with other mass testing studies. The virus has also been found in at least five other long-term care facilities in the greater Richmond area.
My mother is in a long-term care facility here. It is not one of the three local facilities that have reported cases, but looking at the Richmond results suggests there probably are some cases at her facility. The facility has not let family or non-medical people visit for several weeks. The residents no longer eat together in the dining room. There are no organized activities such as chair yoga, bingo, or book club. While residents can still get together in a common area to chat, Mom says no one seems to be doing that any longer.They do take the temperature of each resident daily and ask about symptoms. If they plan on testing everyone, they haven't told the families yet.
The generations have flipped. I feel like a parent with a kid on a school trip abroad (younger son did two such trips in high school) knowing that there's nothing I can do except trust other adults to watch over and out for him. I can work to control my own little world; I just hope they're doing the same for my mother.
1 comment:
If 70% of the general population had already had it then surely it wouldn't be spreading so quickly through the herd? I can see how it will still enter a "closed" community because it isn't closed at all, the staff have homes and families like the rest of us rather than it being a monestary where everyone lives in.
Here the government has ordered 17.5m testing kits but they can't be rolled out because the testing kits are being tested. I would be a bit peeved if I found that I had changed my life around to avoid catching this, spent weeks on best allocation of scarce resource meal planning and cleaning doorknobs when I'd had it anyway and needn't have bothered. I'd be incandescent to be given a false positive and spread it to my family.
The forecast is for a fine and sunny weekend here, no doubt there will be idiots gathering at the beach and we'll all be sent to our rooms next week.
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