Following updated guidance from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, Minnesota health officials on Thursday loosened visitation restrictions at long-term care facilities in the state.
The new rules allow for “responsible indoor visitation at all times and for all residents, regardless of vaccination status of the resident or visitor,” with a handful of exceptions, according to a news release issued by the Minnesota Department of Health.
Those exceptions include:
- Unvaccinated residents should not receive visitors if the COVID-19 test positivity rate in their county is greater than 10 percent and fewer than 70 percent of the residents in their facility have been fully vaccinated.
- Residents with a confirmed COVID-19 infection, regardless of vaccination status, should not receive visitors until they have met the criteria to discontinue transmission-based precautions.
- Residents in quarantine, regardless of their vaccination status, should not receive visitors until they have met the criteria to be released from quarantine.
Visitors and residents at nursing homes and assisted living facilities should be continue to take precautions like masking, hand washing and maintaining six feet of social distance, officials said.
MDH and federal officials cited rising COVID-19 vaccination rates and declining infection rates in announcing the rollback of restrictions.
The new guidelines also stipulate that “compassionate care visits” should always be allowed, regardless of a resident’s vaccination status or their county’s COVID-19 positivity rate.
Previous rules prohibited long-term care facilities from hosting visitors unless the facilities were COVID-free for at least 14 days, and the county in which it is located has a positivity rate of less than 10 percent.
Isolation has taken a toll on older Minnesotans in assisted living and nursing homes during the pandemic, with a handful of deaths linked directly to loneliness because of coronavirus restrictions.
This was also acknowledged in In a statement Wednesday laying out the reasons for updating the new recommendations. Dr. Lee A. Fleisher, the chief medical officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, cited the millions of vaccines administered to nursing home residents and staff and a decline in coronavirus cases in nursing homes.
“CMS recognizes the psychological, emotional and physical toll that prolonged isolation and separation from family have taken on nursing home residents and their families,” he said.
Earlier in the pandemic, the coronavirus raced through long-term care facilities in the United States, accounting for more than a third of all virus deaths since late spring. But since the arrival of vaccines, new cases in nursing homes have fallen steeply, outpacing national declines.
This report contains information from the New York Times; Pioneer Press reporter Christopher Magan also contributed.
