All SC care facilities must allow indoor visits and hugs, with a few exceptions.Columbia

Columbia — With a few exceptions, all care facilities in South Carolina must open their doors to loved ones under the new guidelines announced on March 19.

And when they do, hugs and kisses are newly allowed.

Under new regulations announced by the State Department of Health and Environment, less than 70% of residents are fully vaccinated and nursing homes and life support centers visit indoors unless the community is large. Must be allowed. In that scenario, visits can only be withheld from unvaccinated residents.

Other exceptions include not allowing visits by residents who are infected with COVID-19 or who are isolated due to close contact with a sick person.

The only situation in which a facility can ban all visits is when a resident or employee gives a new positive. If so, you need to test everyone inside. The blockade should only continue if the test finds a case in another area of ​​the facility. Otherwise, the door will take effect immediately according to the new rules.

The state’s most vulnerable people needed to be protected from illnesses that prey on older people, but it’s time to release them, with safety protocols such as face masks and temperature checks still in place. Nick Davidson, Senior Deputy Officer for Public Health at DHEC, said.

“Nursing home and long-term care home residents, and their families and friends, benefit mentally, mentally and physically from being able to see their loved ones,” he said. “There are quite a few exceptions and they are quite limited.”

The DHEC update continues to further loosen the rules that the federal government has placed behind locked doors for loved ones over the past year.

Even after limited visits were granted last fall, strict social distance guidelines ensure that plastic “booths” are indoors during time-limited booking exchanges, as long as they aren’t separated. Or you are required to separate 6 feet outdoors. However, exceptions are allowed for dying patients and other “compassionate care” scenarios.

The latest rules have not yet fully returned to a pre-pandemic visit, but they do show a major step in that direction, including specifically allowing the long-awaited embrace. With the exception of compassionate care visits, rules previously posted by DHEC prohibited “hugging, kissing, holding hands, or other physical contact.”

Later, the Federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services changed the rules.

“The facility needs to allow all residents to visit indoors at any time (regardless of vaccination status),” a federal agency said in a guideline adopted by DHEC last week.

Federal updates recommend that families adhere to a 6-foot quarantine as “the safest way to prevent the spread of COVID-19,” but Medicaid agencies are sacrificed by forced quarantine and quarantine. I admitted.

“We also acknowledge that there is no substitute for physical contact, such as a warm hug between residents and their loved ones,” the agency writes.

Therefore, the new rules allow fully vaccinated residents to “wear proper masks” and stay close to the visitor as long as they wash their hands back and forth. Visitors must be 6 feet away from others in the facility.

Also, individual facilities can set a time limit for visits, which is no longer required by DHEC. A break from DHEC rules is a 30-minute clock for visitors who haven’t had recent negative test results and took up to an hour to sit or stand 6 feet away. Also, the newly posted guidelines no longer limit the exclusion of children under the age of 12.

Currently, 82% of the 688 long-term care facilities regulated by DHEC allow certain types of visits, indoors, outdoors, or both, but 17% are completely closed to visitors. It is unclear what is happening at the seven facilities that did not submit weekly status reports to DHEC as needed.

This is an improvement from a week ago when 72% of the facilities allowed some kind of visit.

According to Davidson, the new rules need to “significantly expand” the rules that allow indoor visits.

With the exception of unvaccinated people, no county in South Carolina has shown high community expansion. This was the main reason cited by facilities that do not allow indoor visits.

According to Davidson, it’s unclear how many people have a vaccination rate of less than 70%.

Immunization of long-term care residents and staff in South Carolina began on December 28 through a federal contract between Walgreens and CVS Pharmacy. Most people had the opportunity to be vaccinated because the pharmacy visited all nursing homes and almost all life support centers twice. According to DHEC, the third visit should be completed by the end of the month.

Nearly 36,300 residents and more than 22,000 employees received at least the first two shots. According to DHEC, each group has about 40,000 people.

People are not considered fully vaccinated until two weeks after the last injection.

Since October, the DHEC website will list what kind of visits are allowed, if the facility is allowed. A new addition to the public report this week is why, as directed by Governor Henry McMaster, the facility offers if it does not allow visits.

The governor said they couldn’t, believing it was part of the important transparency for South Carolinas who wanted to meet their loved ones. They should be able to know the reason and question whether the cited reason is accurate or an excuse, said his spokesman Brian Simms.

Weekly Online report According to DHEC, the new guidelines will begin to be reflected in the week of March 30th.

DHEC officials encourage anyone who believes their loved one’s facility does not follow the new guidelines to file a complaint. online Or by phone, the agency promises to follow up.

According to DHEC data, 19,546 coronaviruses have been identified in nursing homes and life support facilities, 62% of which are resident. This is a recent increase in cases of less than 1%.

To date, 1,890 residents and 29 workers have died from the virus, accounting for 24% of all South Carolina residents who died from COVID-19.

Of the 688 DHEC-regulated facilities, 95 have active outbreaks, which means that at least one case has been detected in the last two weeks. This is a 38% decrease from the beginning of March.

Cleeve Okin Charleston contributed to this report.