Elder Affairs chief impressed by response at assisted living centers
Assisted living facilities in Massachusetts have made “really impressive” progress reining in the highly infectious coronavirus after rapid spread earlier this year, Elder Affairs Secretary Elizabeth Chen said Thursday.
While she urged continued vigilance, Chen praised care workers for overseeing a significant turnaround in transmission rates that has maintained course for about four months.
Between March and May, assisted living residences in Massachusetts were home to about 2,000 resident cases of COVID-19, Chen said in her remarks at the Massachusetts Assisted Living Association’s virtual conference. Since the start of June, she said, total resident cases have barely surpassed 100.
“That is really impressive,” Chen said. “The infection rates in traditional units dropped to less than half of 1% from a high of 7%. For special care units, where it has been particularly challenging, the infection rate has gone from 21% to 1.3%.”
She paused and began clapping, offering “a big applause to every single one of you” tuned in to the conference.
The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought devastating consequences in the broader long-term care industry, both in Massachusetts and nationally. Nearly two-thirds of the state’s deaths linked to the virus occurred in long-term care facilities, which include rest homes and nursing homes.
Chen said the public health crisis “pushed every single one of us beyond our own perceived limits,” praising work by leaders in assisted living to get the crisis under control as well as the Baker administration’s response.
She touted the partnership with the Massachusetts National Guard to perform on-site COVID-19 testing in the spring and a long-term care staffing portal the administration launched to help fill vacancies.
Echoing many public health experts, Chen cautioned that Massachusetts will not return to a “preCOVID way of life” until a vaccine or effective treatment for the disease is widely available.
But compared to earlier in the pandemic, she said the state’s 17,000 assisted living residents are far safer today.
“The dangers are not gone, but you’ve put a very, very good fencing around the property,” Chen said.
A key problem that many longterm care residents face, she said, is isolation, which was exacerbated by the mandatory limits on visitation and in-person socialization implemented to limit spread of the virus.
“This extended period of isolation is hard,” Chen said. “We already know that isolation has negative health consequences. Your model is meant to bring people together and to forestall that isolation that people normally face as they get older, and so it’s hard.”
Baker, who has spoken about his 92-year-old father in a continuing care community many times during the crisis, on Thursday recounted the challenges his family personally faced.