The state Health Department sent out updated guidance on COVID-19 for health care professionals.
Here are some of the highlights.
- Surgical masks should be worn when providing patient contact.
- A N-95 should be worn when aerosol-generating procedures are being performed.
- Anyone in a health care facility (patients, visitors, staff) should have at minimum a cloth mask on.
- Anyone entering health care facility should have temperature and symptom screening
- Patients with fever and symptoms consistent with COVID-19 should be placed in isolation under contact and droplet precautions
- Hands should be washed before and after donning and doffing of isolation gowns
- If you are exposed to COVID without protection, you can continue working as long as you don’t have symptoms, provided you wear a facemask and monitor yourself for fever and symptoms for 14 days.
- Testing should be reserved only for those with symptoms.
- Health care workers should limit their work to one facility. (Many at hospitals and in EMS have multiple jobs)
- Antibody tests are currently unreliable and should not be used to determine who might have had COVID and who might be immune.
Here at our hospital as well as on the ambulance, I get my temperature taken on entry. At the hospital they had some new camera like device this morning that is supposed to be more accurate. It clocked me at 94 degrees. There is also a new sign on the elevator. Instead of limiting each ride to three people, it is now done to two. Our cafeteria has started selling toilet paper, milk and bread to employees.
As far as my own PPE, I have made some changes to better protect myself. When treating a known COVID patient or taking care of a patient who I suspect may have COVID, I now wear a second gown on my 6'8" frame as an apron to provide protection from the waist down so for when I am in the back of the ambulance, the patient's arms are not on my pants when I am doing an IV or administering medication. I still have gaps at the wrists between the too short gown sleeves and my gloves -- a gap I plan in the future to fix with tape.
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Meanwhile the latest Washington University model shows an uptick in projected deaths for Connecticut up to 2,884 by August 4 where their previous model predicted 2,732. The model assumes Connecticut maintains its current social distancing practices through June. It does not take into account a second wave.
Hospitalizations ticked up again.
And I had my busiest day ever at the hospital notifying EMS of patients they had transported who tested positive for COVID here.
