Worker with virus forced from hotel
A personal support worker from Peterborough who’s on the COVID-19 front line in Ottawa was evicted from a hotel where she’s been living and made to move to another hotel when it was found out she’d contracted the illness.
“They dragged her out of bed and trotted her up the street to another hotel that was under construction,” said Tammie Miceli, mother of PSW Courtney Nesbitt.
Nesbitt, 30, lives in Peterborough. She grew up in Keene and moved with her family to Peterborough while in high school and attended Holy Cross Secondary School.
She has a decade of experience in personal support work, her mother said, and recently took a threemonth contract to work at Extendicare Laurier Manor in Ottawa.
Nesbitt took the job in a home where she knew residents had COVID-19 and needed staff, Miceli said. That’s typical of her daughter: “Anyone who needs her — that’s who she is.”
When she felt overheated at work one day earlier this month, her mother said, Nesbitt thought nothing of it since she was wearing layers of personal protective equipment.
But Nesbitt had a fever and soon she tested positive for COVID-19.
Nesbitt’s employer put her up in Homewood Suites by Hilton near the Ottawa Airport and she was sent there to self-isolate.
But she was soon informed she’d have to leave, her mother said, because hotel staff was
“not comfortable” reporting to a workplace with a COVID-19 infection.
Her employer was concerned to hear she was moved.
Extendicare pays for hotel rooms for staff from outside Ottawa who come to work on short-term contract in the pandemic, wrote regional director Cory Nezan in a statement emailed to The Examiner.
They also pay for hotel isolation for any employee who contracts COVID-19, Nezan wrote.
Nezan believed there was “a mutual agreement” with hotel management to keep any ill employees isolated in place, she wrote, “and we are very concerned to hear that may not be the case.”
Nesbitt was feverish and “not thinking straight” as she packed her stuff to leave, says her mother, but was still moved to a nearby hotel under renovation.
She and her husband Ron Miceli were frantic when they heard — they thought she would be allowed to isolate on the spot for two weeks, if she were to become ill. But she was sick and being moved and there was not much the parents could do to help from their home in Lakefield.
On Friday, Nesbitt was still in her new hotel room and too ill to speak to The Examiner.
The parents would like to drive to Ottawa to get their daughter, Miceli said, but they can’t safely move her until her symptoms improve.
“Our hands are tied,” she said. “Too bad a corporation’s hands aren’t tied.”
In a statement issued Friday to The Examiner, hotel management confirms that it has had employees of a local healthcare company as guests for the last four weeks.
The hotel and employer had agreed that “alternate accommodations” would be provided to anyone who contracts COVID-19, the statement reads — and in this case, the guest was offered a room in another of its hotels, 200 metres away.
“We have done what we can to show this guest our hospitality, providing additional groceries, hot meals, and cooking equipment at no cost to her or her employer,” the statement reads.
Miceli says she speaks to her daughter three times daily over the phone and a doctor also calls to check in.
Meanwhile Miceli and her husband want their daughter to come home to Peterborough, but Nesbitt has hinted to her mother that she might go back to finish her work contract when she recovers.
“She’s dedicated.”