Vaccines help assisted-living homes crack open the doors

Bingo is back in the dining room. In-person visits have returned, too, although with masks and plexiglass. The Haven Assisted Living Facility’s residents are even planning a field trip for a private movie screening once they’ve all gotten their second round of COVID-19 vaccines.

Such changes are small but meaningful to residents in the Hayden longterm-care home, and they’re mostly the result of the arrival of the vaccine.

While the vaccine rollout has hit snags across the U.S., including in many large urban areas, some rural counties — with their smaller populations and well-connected communities — have gotten creative about getting the doses out quickly to long-term-care facilities. They are circumventing bogged-down Walgreens and CVS pharmacy sites — which had been contracted for the campaign — and instead are inoculating their older residents with the counties’ shares of doses.

It’s clear why the counties are trying their own path. Federal data provided by the state show that, as of Jan. 21, dozens of longterm care facilities in Colorado were enrolled to receive vaccines from Walgreens or CVS but still did not have any vaccination dates scheduled. Among assisted-living facilities in particular, rural locations tended to have later start dates than nonrural ones. By mid-January, more than 90 facilities had opted out of the program, which has been beset by cumbersome paperwork and corporate policies.

When Roberta who directs the

Smith, Routt

County Public Health Department, learned in December that The Haven and another facility in the county hadn’t gotten any dates from Walgreens for their shots, she diverted about 100 doses from the county’s allotment.

The vaccines likely would have gone to health care workers, she said, but she couldn’t let the most vulnerable in the county wait.

Fourteen of the 19 people who died of COVID-19 in the county, after all, had been residents of those two long-term care facilities.

The county received a shipment of Moderna vaccines the following week to continue with its health care workers, Smith said.

The health department ensured that all able and willing residents of the county’s two long-termcare facilities received their first doses before 2021 began. Smith suspects such reprioritization and fast deployment — despite the department’s reliance on spreadsheets and sticky notes to schedule visits — is easier in small communities.

“There is a sense of community in our smaller, rural counties that we’re all kind of looking out for each other. And when you tell someone, ‘Hey, we need to vaccinate these folks first,’ they’re quick to say, ‘Oh, yeah,’ ” Smith said.

Hayden, a town of about 2,000 in northwestern Colorado, is the kind of place where, within hours of Haven staffers posting online that they were looking for a grill, workers from the hardware store delivered one at no charge. It’s the kind of town where locals have come throughout the pandemic to serenade Haven residents with guitar, flute and violin performances outside the windows. When the virus hit The Haven, eventually killing two of its 15 residents, locals paraded past the facility in their cars, taped with balloons and signs that said “We love you” and “Get well soon.”

After all the heartache, isolation and waiting, newly vaccinated resident Rosa Lawton, 70, is ready to bust out of The Haven. She said she expected to get her second vaccine dose Thursday.

“I hope to be able to go shopping at Walmart and City Market and go to the bank, the library, the senior center. … I won’t stop,” she said, laughing. “Right now, we’re restricted to the building.”

Even after getting everyone vaccinated, though, assisted-living locations won’t be able to fling open the doors quite yet. State and federal officials need to give the OK, said Doug Farmer, president and CEO of the Colorado Health Care Association, which represents long-term-care facilities in the state. Still, the combination of vaccines, repeated negative COVID-19 tests and a lower level of virus spread in the community is allowing some facilities the peace of mind to crack the doors open just a bit in the meantime.

Until recently, Lawton and others at The Haven were playing bingo perched in their doorways, with a staff member moving down the hallway calling out numbers. Lawton said she could see about four others from her door, but not her friends Sally, Ruth or Louise. Now, they’re back in the dining room, with one person to a table and playing with sanitized chips.

“We can see each other, and we’re closer together. And we can hear the caller better,” Lawton said. “It’s just more of a group experience.”

Residents now can gather in the common areas, wearing masks, to play the piano and do target practice with foam dart guns. And the excursion to a movie theater next month will be the first field trip in nearly a year. (Lawton is rooting for watching “The Sound of Music.”)

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service. It is an editorially independent program of Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.