From the CBC:
“Fully vaccinated but still in
lockdown, long-term care resident says she's treated 'less than human'”
Chelsea Dreher, 32, is fully
vaccinated after receiving her second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in late
February, but she hasn't been able to leave her ward, go outside or visit other
residents for almost two weeks. That's because she lives at the Wascana
Rehabilitation Centre, a long-term care facility in Regina, and her particular
ward has been under a lockdown since a staff member tested positive for
COVID-19 a little less than two weeks ago, she said. Dreher has cerebral palsy
and has lived at the facility for almost nine years. She said living without
any freedom is particularly difficult to deal with because she believed
vaccinations would make a difference. "It feels like a kick in the
face," she said. After residents and workers were offered the first dose
of the vaccine, Dreher said the facility posted a sheet of paper listing
everyone in the building who had accepted it. While almost all of the residents received
the vaccine, she said, only about 50 per cent of the workers did the same. "It
makes me mad," she told CBC News. "I think when you're working in a
facility where you are working with vulnerable people who are more susceptible
to illnesses than the average person, then I think vaccination should be
mandatory." After Dreher was fully vaccinated, she asked the unit manager
if she would be able to go home for visits. She was told no one would stop her
from leaving, but she would need to self-isolate for 14 days when she returned.
"I would essentially be closing my door for two weeks," she said.
Different restrictions Dreher
has a friend in the centre who is also fully vaccinated, and they received
special permission to see each other because he doesn't have a lot of family. Long-term care facilities in Regina are
subject to Level 3 restrictions — the most stringent — that only allow family
members to visit residents who are dying or declining dramatically. When
the facility is in Level 3, she and her friend are only allowed to meet in the
hallway, and when it's under a lockdown, they can't see each other at all. "I
don't understand why we're not allowed to intermingle with residents a little
bit because he's not going anywhere else," Dreher said. "He's just
going from my room to his room and back." She said that staff at
the facility don't face the same restrictions and are allowed to visit in the
cafeteria and mingle with workers from other units, while Dreher and her friend
are required to meet in the hallway. "They're not under the same
restrictions and lockdowns that we are at their end of the shift," Dreher
said. "They get to go home and go out to get their groceries and what have
you. You know, they still have some liberties that they can take and we
don't."
Treated 'less than human' Dreher
said she didn't expect things to go back to normal after she was vaccinated,
but she would like to have more freedom. "One thing that I would
really like is to just go home like once a week," she said. "That's
really all I want at this point, is to go home and see my family and my animals
and eat a decent meal." Dreher said she thought that once she was
fully vaccinated, she would be able to see people if she wore a mask, washed
her hands and stayed physically distanced, but that hasn't been the case. She'd
like to know a timeline or a procedure for relaxing the restrictions. "I'm
so tired of being treated like less than human, and I imagine the others here
are as well," she said. "It's like you don't have rights anymore, you
don't have freedoms, you don't have a say in anything. And it's just
aggravating."
Ministry reviewing policy Saskatchewan's
Ministry of Health said in a statement that it is reviewing the current family
visitation policy at long-term care homes and "considering factors
including vaccination rates and current community transmission risk." "The
decision to put these measures in place was not made lightly and removing the
restrictions will only happen when it is safe to do so," the statement
said. The ministry said any update to the policy would be announced
publicly via a news conference or release. CBC News asked about the
vaccine uptake among workers at the Wascana Rehabilitation Centre, but the
Saskatchewan Health Authority did not provide a response. Infectious
diseases specialist Dr. Anand Kumar said there's no clear formula to determine
when long-term care facilities will be able to open up to more visitors. Kumar, an attending physician at the
Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg and a professor of medicine and medical
microbiology and pharmacology at the University of Manitoba, said there will
always be a subset of people who can't take the vaccine, who choose not to take
the vaccine or whose families choose on their behalf not to do so. Additionally,
he said, many long-term care residents have chronic organ failure, which
creates a suboptimal response to the vaccine. "So rather than
getting the high level of protection that we would hope, there may be a subset
of people, particularly elderly people, who have less robust resistance to
infection after vaccination," he said. Long-term care homes also
have to contend with the vaccination status of visitors and workers, Kumar
said, and he's concerned about variants, noting that data suggests current
vaccines only provide partial protection against the new strains. "My
heart goes out to [Dreher]," he said. "It's not fair to her. But then
again, it's not fair to the other people that would be put at risk if there was
unlimited visitation allowed at this stage." Kumar said he looks forward
to the day when all long-term care facilities can open up and allow full
visitation, but it may be awhile before that happens. "It may be wiser to
kind of do it … on a single institution basis," he said. "That is to
say, judge each institution based on the level of vaccination, the number of
people who are vaccinated, the number of employees and visitors who are
vaccinated, etc. Basically make it a judgment case by case."
Mandatory vaccination Kumar
said he thinks mandating that all health-care workers in these facilities be
vaccinated is the right thing to do. "Quite frankly, if I had my
way, everybody who works in the institution or visits the institution would
have to be vaccinated," he said. 'I don't feel like a person':
Sask. long-term care resident says COVID restrictions affecting mental health
"I think that having a significant number of people not vaccinated,
along with a subset of residents who can't be vaccinated potentially or having
suboptimal responses to vaccination, really invites disaster." That said, Kumar said he also thinks there
will never be a perfect solution. If the maximum number of people were
vaccinated at a facility, he said, that would be when the facility might be
able to open up for visitation. "At some point you have to start to
open up. You have to start giving people some joy back into their lives,
especially those that are in long-term care facilities. And so, you know, the
question isn't whether it's perfectly safe. The question is whether the risk is
an acceptable one." Dreher said she and the other residents at
Wascana Rehab have been getting COVID tests "religiously," and she
hopes that with the next round of testing, everyone will be negative and the
lockdown will be over soon. "And
I'll be able to see my friend again, which at this point, is needed," she
said. Though her spirits are low, Dreher said she was very excited to
get the vaccine because it felt like she was one step closer to getting her
life back. "Now I don't dare to hope to get that back because …
it's just going to get ripped away," she said. And Dreher has a
message for the workers who haven't yet received the vaccine: "Maybe you
should find a different job."
^ Sadly these kinds of
restrictions affect millions of people throughout Canada and the United States.
If you are vaccinated then you should be allowed to have visitors and even
leave the facility/institution. Doctors and Politicians continue to use chaotic
and even dumb restrictions just because they can (even when there is no legal or
medical basis for them.) That may have been accepted in March 2020 when no one
had a clue what to do about Covid, but here we are over a year later and that
is no longer acceptable. I think there needs to be Local, State/Provincial, Federal
and even Independent reviews on how the Government, Hospitals, Group Homes,
Nursing Homes, Veterans’ Homes, Schools, Universities, etc. handled or
mishandled Covid 19 and those involved in the mishandling need to be punished
and those who stepped-up need to be rewarded. ^
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