**COVID-19 Updated**
September 17th, 2021

I hope your week is going well. I am pleased to report that 4 patients whose initial COVID-19 antigen test results were positive have now received negative confirmatory PCR results, which is a more sensitive test. Therefore, these patients are not considered to be positive for COVID-19 and have been removed from the cumulative totals below.

On September 10, 2021, The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) published new guidance that includes a new methodology for determining the frequency of routine testing of staff members for COVID-19. Previously, the Center based routine staff testing on the county positivity rate as published by the Virginia Department of Health. The September 10 CMS Memo recommends testing based on the new CDC COVID-19 Integrated County View website that reports the level of community transmission of COVID-19 by county or city for each state. We have moved to using this new tracker this week and will begin reporting the community transmission levels each week in the section below.

CDC County Community Transmission Level and Percent Positivity: High – 20.9%
Testing: While in an outbreak, patients and staff are tested every 3-7 days until the Center is 14 days without a positive test result.
PPE: The supply remains adequate. Staff have received ongoing education on appropriate PPE utilization.
Visitation: Visitation is temporarily suspended with the exception of compassionate care visits.

As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions you may have.

Sincerely,

Ashley Jones, BSN, RN, LNHA
Administrator