BUFFALO (WBEN) - Per New York State's announcement earlier this week, indoor visitations can resume at nursing homes starting Friday.
Visitor testing protocols vary according to the seven-day COVID positivity rate in each individual county. For counties with a rate below 5%, visitor testing is not required but strongly encouraged. In counties where the seven-day positivity rate falls between 5-10%, testing is mandated, and for counties that exceed 10%, visitation at nursing homes is not permitted.
Erie County currently sits comfortably under the 5% threshold for required visitor testing.
However, facilities are still required to go 14 days without any COVID cases, meaning many nursing homes aren't actually eligible to welcome visitors starting Friday.
"It is frustrating because we care so much for our residents, and our heart breaks for our residents as well, and they want to see their loved ones," said Michelle Kraus, nursing home director of Terrace View Long-Term Care.
Kraus said they had a COVID case a week ago, so they're planning for visitation starting March 6th.
"My team and I are actually going over a plan now, a safe plan, so our residents can start to visit with their loved ones," she said.
The GreenFields in Lancaster is one of the facilities fortunate enough to open Friday, and President Chris Koenig outlined some of their process of visitation.
"People do have to call to make an appointment - we've got visitations right now between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Friday," he said.
Koenig noted The GreenFields will still require testing for visitors even though Erie County is currently below that 5% positivity rate threshold.
"We're actually going to require that all of our visitors to have a test, but they're going to have the opportunity to have a rapid test here, so we'll be able to do that for them," Koenig continued. "One of the issues I'm always concerned about in the language from the state is they put the onus back on us - they don't always say that publicly when they're speaking, but in the guidance we got, it says (testing) is strongly encouraged, and that's bolded. What that does is leaves it up to the interpretation of an inspector to come in here to decide if we made the right decision or not."
