| Rules designed to protect the nation's most vulnerable from COVID-19 are still being enforced even though 75% of nursing home residents are now vaccinated and infections and deaths have plummeted.
Frustration has set in as families around the country visit their loved ones. Hugs and kisses are still discouraged or banned in some nursing homes. Residents are dining in relative isolation and playing bingo and doing crafts at a distance. Visits are limited and must be kept short, and are cut off entirely if someone tests positive for the coronavirus.
Family members and advocates question the need for such restrictions at this stage of the pandemic, when the risk is comparatively low. They say the measures are now just prolonging older people's isolation and accelerating their mental and physical decline.
“They have protected them to death,” said Denise Gracely, whose 80-year-old mother, Marian Rauenzahn, lives in a nursing home in Topton, Pennsylvania.
Rauenzahn had COVID-19 and then lost part of a leg to gangrene, but Gracely said what she struggled with the most was enforced solitude, going from six-day-a-week visits to none at all.
Rauenzahn's daughters eventually won the right to see her once a week, and the nursing home now says it plans to relax the rules on visits for all residents in late June. But it has not been not enough, as far as Gracely is concerned.
“I believe it's progressed her dementia,” Gracely said. “She's very lonely. She wants out of there so bad.”
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