As virus cases rise, hospital bans visitors
NORWALK — Visitors have been temporarily banned at Norwalk Hospital as COVID-19 cases increase in the area, while officials at other health facilities say they are closely monitoring the situation but do not think guest restrictions are needed right now.
Norwalk Hospital is the first in southern Connecticut to recently ban visitors after several in the eastern part of the state, where there has been a cluster of COVID-19 outbreaks, restricted access to their facilities earlier this month.
But elsewhere in southern Connecticut, some hospital officials said cases haven’t reached the point
where visitation would be restricted again.
“Just like everybody else, we’ve seen a small increase (in hospitalizations). It certainly seems be picking up over Fairfield County for now,” said Dr. Daniel Gottschall, vice president of medical affairs for the Fairfield region of Hartford HealthCare and St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport.
Though some Hartford HealthCare facilities — Backus Hospital in Norwich, Windham Hospital in Windham and Natchaug Hospital in Mansfield — have restricted visitors, St. Vincent’s has no plans to restrict guests right now, Gottshall said.
On Sunday night, Norwalk Hospital announced the visitation change, which took effect immediately. Norwalk is part of Nuvance Health, a system that also includes Danbury, New Milford and Sharon hospitals. On Friday, Sharon Hospital also announced it was restricting visitors.
Based on the state Department of Public Health’s color-coded alert system, Norwalk is at a yellow level. That alert is issued after nine confirmed cases per 100,000 residents — 112 infections — and a 2.7 percent positivity rate. A red alert is issued after 15 confirmed cases per 100,000 residents.
“Based on the infection rate in the greater Norwalk communities, our infection control/prevention, infectious disease, quality, and other medical experts determined it was necessary to limit visitation at Norwalk Hospital out of an abundance of caution,” said Steve Meth, Nuvance’s chief experience officer.
Visitors will only be permitted for extenuating circumstances, which can include end-of-life situations as well as patients with behavioral concerns, who need communication support and who have cognitive impairments. While extenuating circumstances in most cases will only allow one person to visit the patient at a time, parents with minor children can have one adult family member and one child at their bedside.
Though Danbury has had spikes in COVID cases over the past few weeks, the outbreak was localized to specific areas in the city, so it wasn’t deemed necessary to restrict visitors at Danbury Hospital, Meth said. However, the hospital has maintained some visitor restrictions, limiting visitation to one guest per day for most inpatients for up to four hours per visit.
“We regularly review the visitation policy at all hospitals with the changing COVID-19 environment,” Meth said. “Our interdisciplinary approach looks across Nuvance Health and narrowly tailors visitation guidelines to best meet each hospital’s needs.”
At St. Vincent’s, Gottschall said, the policy is also one visitor at a time, except when there are extenuating circumstances. Officials at Stamford and Greenwich hospitals also said they have not yet changed their visitor policies.
“We have not yet decided to restrict any visitors as our number of hospitalizations — although they have increased slightly — are still low and manageable,” Stamford Health spokeswoman Andrea Jodko said. “We continue to monitor the situation closely.”
Though there were concerns in recent weeks in New London and Windham counties that caused hospitals to ban visitors, the state reported on Monday that hospitalizations in the past day had fallen by three in New London County and remained flat in Windham County, but had increased by three in Fairfield County.