I want to insert for the reccord, excerpts from Rhonda’s remarks from Monday’s open meeting.
Let’s review how we got here. On Friday, December 9th, staff was notified of residents who had tested positive for Covid and had been in close contact with about 50 other residents during the time that they could have been contagious.
Yadira, Caroline, and I divided the list of 50 people and called each one, asking them to report to our pop-up testing site. Which was my office. Angela, Victoria, Ethan, and Alejandra got the testing set up for 50 people with less than an hour’s notice. By the end of Friday, we had 5 Independent Living residents who had tested positive for Covid.
On Sunday, December 11th, we began to hear from more residents who were experiencing symptoms. In response, we closed the auditorium and asked residents who live in the Tower to visit residents in the Lee Center by phone or online, rather than in-person. We also strongly encouraged those 50 residents who had been in close contact with Covid positive residents to pick up their meals from the dining room and dine in their apartments. In that moment, staff needed to adjust their plans for serving meals, collecting trays, disposing of garbage, and more.
Monday, December 12th marked the 3rd day … By the end of Monday, 19 Independent Living residents had tested positive for Covid.
So, within 3 days, we basically added the equivalent of a new wing of “patients”. We needed to create systems supporting clinical monitoring, serving meals, disposing of garbage, etc. in addition to the staff’s regular duties.
One week following the initial case, we had 25 Independent Living residents with Covid.
…We believe we have seen the peak of our numbers in the Tower. And, we hope to see the number of positive cases decrease over the next week or so. But, we still face further challenges. Our nursing staff in the Tower is stretched very thin supporting all the cases in the Tower until they are cleared. And, some of these residents are still pretty sick…. This comes at a time when a number of other staff are traveling for the holidays. So, we cannot call many staff back to cover for our Covid positive staff because they are not even in the local area.
By and large staff did a really good job of coping with this sudden outbreak. And the residents responded very sensibly as well. No carping, just a shrug and “well, back to pandemic rules.”
Tuesday 12/20/2022
Was awakened at 2:29 am by my phone saying loudly “Earthquake! Drop, cover and hold!” It was the shake alert app telling me about a 6.4 quake “in Humboldt county”. I looked at that and said, no way will we feel that here. But I stayed up a while to see how fast media would respond. They basically didn’t. The local CBS outlet had a “crawler” giving the bare facts, half an hour later. So, back to bed.
Went down and did the gym machine round at 8. Then at 9 I met with Mary Ann who no longer wants to show pictures from her phone on the 11th floor (see 4.009) because the covid outbreak canceled the big family visit she was planning. Now she wants to show pictures from her phone on the tv in her apartment. We went over how to do that.
Then it was time for the writers meeting. I again hadn’t written anything and I wasn’t much impressed with the other writers’ output either.
After lunch I went up to 11 and took another look at the TV setup. This time I made the assumption that whoever had put in the new Comcast box had done it right, so I tried turning on the system with the Comcast remote, instead of the TV remote as we had been doing. And sure enough the had sync’d the Comcast remote to both the receiver and the TV so it turns everything on. Then I cleaned out ten years’ accumulation of useless tech junk from the media cabinet. Now I have a bag of tech junk to dispose of.
At three I met with Kass and we once again went over the problems of the “lecternette” she is using for a mic amplifier for the eight days of Hanukkah that she is running in the lobby. They’ve not been canceled because it’s a small group and they mask up. The problem is the lecternette makes a “pop” noise at intervals. I think it might be some kind of RFI from something in or around the lobby, being picked up by the receiver for the wireless mic. But I can’t prove it. I swapped a couple of cables out and jiggled things and it might have gotten better.
At 6 I met our carpool to go to a SWBB game against Creighton. Creighton is actually nationally ranked, but Stanford handled them fairly easily despite giving up 16 turnovers. Lepolo, freshman point guard who till now had not been an offensive threat, busted out with four 3-pointers, three in a row to start the game.
Codgerville 