Two-year anniversary marked by handful of cases and optimism

March 8, 2022

It’s been a busy start to the year for the Lyngblomsten community. While day-to-day life feels more like what it was in early 2020 before COVID-19 reached Minnesota, it still is marked by the pandemic.

Here are some highlights since our last update in late December.

Outbreak in early 2022: In January and February, Lyngblomsten experienced a significant increase in new cases of COVID-19 among care center residents and employees, along with a handful of new cases in housing tenants. This outbreak was driven by the highly contagious omicron variant, which impacted not only us, but communities across Minnesota and the country. While those weeks certainly were challenging, we’re grateful that our number of new cases weren’t as many as what we experienced early on in the pandemic.

Response to outbreak: Our response to this recent outbreak consisted of many of the same measures we’ve used throughout the pandemic—things like symptom screening, hand washing, mask wearing, regular testing, contact tracing, quarantining, and more. During this outbreak, some COVID-positive residents were cohorted together in a small COVID Unit (nine rooms total) on one of our care center wings.

New return-to-work protocols: New regulations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have allowed many of our COVID-positive employees to return to work sooner (i.e., after five days of isolation) provided certain conditions are met (e.g., they’ve been experiencing mild or no symptoms and their condition has been improving). If an employee’s symptoms aren’t improving or are getting worse, they can’t return to work at the five-day mark. As we shared in a letter to our residents and their families in early January, the CDC made this change based on the latest research about the virus (in particular the omicron variant), which suggests COVID-positive persons are the most infectious two days before and three days after they begin exhibiting symptoms (or, for those who are asymptomatic, two days before and three days after they test positive).

Visitation continues uninterrupted: During the outbreak, residents and tenants were able to receive visitors uninterrupted, which has continued into March. The most recent guidelines from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) require long-term care facilities not to institute visitation restrictions—even during an outbreak—except in rare circumstances. From day 1 of our pandemic response, ensuring that our residents and tenants have ample opportunities to visit with loved ones has been a high priority. This has been evidenced by our work to offer outdoor visits and virtual visits (the latter which continues today), being an early adopter of the Minnesota Department of Health’s essential caregiver program, and securing special permission from MDH to offer indoor visits in our chapel.

Vaccine mandate in effect: In mid-January, we instituted a vaccine mandate for our care center and home health services employees, as we were required to do so by CMS. Already by that point, though, the vast majority of our staff (i.e., more than 95 percent) was fully vaccinated. A handful of employees applied for and received an exemption from the mandate due to a documented religious or medical reason. We’ve instituted extra precautions for these employees, including having them wear N95 facemasks when certain conditions are met (e.g., type of care they provide, county transmission levels) and testing them each week (the frequency dependent on Ramsey County’s viral transmission levels).

It’s true that the past two months have had their share of challenges. But it’s also true that the Lyngblomsten community—once again—has risen to those challenges with determination and optimism. Two years into the pandemic, we know we’ll be able to face whatever will come in 2022.