Residents of long-term care facilities in B.C. are now allowed to have one social visitor each, regardless of whether there’s a COVID-19 outbreak in their home.
That visitor will not need to be an approved “designated essential” visitor, and those residents who already have a designated essential visitor can still have another social visitor.
“Yes, you can have a backup in case you can’t go, but one at a time, making sure that we do have that all-important connection with at least one additional person,” said Dr. Bonnie Henry on Tuesday.
“What remains unchanged is that these visitors must be fully vaccinated themselves.”
It’s a change that sector advocates and the families of long-term care residents have long called for.
About two-thirds of long-term care residents in B.C. don’t have a designated essential visitor, meaning they could not receive visitors during waves of the pandemic that restricted visitation to essential visitors only.
That measure came into effect late last year as the Omicron variant swept through B.C., but the “one-size-fits-all” approach to long-term care pandemic management is no longer needed, said Henry.
“While some measures continue to apply, we are adjusting this outbreak management approach, reflecting very high levels of transmission, but much less severity for most people because of that high level of protection we have through vaccination, and through short-term protection through people who have been infected now,” she explained.
The new guidance on visitors will appear on the B.C. Centre for Disease Control’s website later on Tuesday.
The province is also shifting its strategy for declaring COVID-19 outbreaks in long-term care homes to reflect the high vaccination rates of residents and staff, and the transmissibility and severity of illness of Omicron.
Medical health officers can now declare an outbreak in a facility in their region on a more case-by-case basis, considering the presence of severe and symptomatic illness, rather than following the “prescriptive criteria” of previous waves.
Before, medical health officers needed evidence of viral transmission within the facility, along with a single positive case in a resident or more than one case in a staff person, among other indicators.
“It is a matter of finding that balance of knowing if there’s a few cases, but there’s not a lot of transmission happening,” Henry explained. “You can isolate those individuals very effectively now because so many people are vaccinated and because we have these other measures in place.”
If there’s more transmission, there’s more severe illness and medical health officers aren’t certain about how it’s being spread, they may look more closely at declaring an outbreak, she added.
Meanwhile, long-term care homes will continue to observe strict health and safety measures, including vaccination, use of personal protective equipment, contact-tracing and quarantining when needed.
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