Frederica Freyberg:

Nursing homes and assisted living facilities across the state are clamping down on visitors in order to prevent coronavirus. New guidelines now include screening all individuals, including health care workers, consultants and visitors before they would be allowed to enter those facilities. Marisa Wojcik sat down with John Vander Meer, the president and CEO of the Wisconsin Health Care Association and Wisconsin Center for Assisted Living to hear what measures facilities are taking.

John Vander Meer:

We’re advising our members to do everything possible to protect the health and safety of the residents that we serve. So our member facilities are engaging in a couple of critical practices. First of all, they’re limiting visitations of all visitors to a facility. Any visitors that do actually go into the facility, they’re making sure that they wash their hands and that there are screening practices in place of those visitors. That there’s a restriction on large groups in those facilities to enact some social distancing. And then obviously I think when you’re dealing with a vulnerable population, it’s important to make sure that those individuals have access to their families. So we’re recommending that our facilities and our facilities are adopting practices to ensure that Facetime and remote conferencing options are available to ensure that residents still maintain that psychosocial connection with their family members. One of the things that’s very important to realize in this set of circumstances in the pandemic is the issue of the morbidity rates among the elderly. So it could be 15% and higher. In the event that testing is necessary from a clinical standpoint, we’re doing everything that we can at the state level and the individual facility level and the provider community to work with state officials to ensure that there’s testing available.

Frederica Freyberg:

The Wisconsin Elections Commission late this week decided to allow municipal clerks with guidance of local health officials to relocate polling places currently slated to be in nursing homes and other facilities where public health is a concern. The commission also directed municipal clerks to mail absentee ballots directly to residents in nursing homes and care facilities instead of dispatching teams of special voting deputies to those places where vulnerable populations live.