Juniper Communities is one of the first advocates of widespread detection of Covid-19 in the elderly; however, the evidence is also unreasonable.
According to founder and CEO Lynne Katzmann, the based supplier in Bloomfield, New Jersey, spends about $100,000 a week on Covid-19 checks. This allowed the company to verify its main citizens and affiliates and, in turn, reduce its number of Covid-19 instances to 0 after finding dozens of positive instances among citizens and in early April.
In short, Katzmann believes that senior service providers want to control citizens and their affiliates in advance and in order to expand a war plan to restrict the spread of the virus. But it’s expensive, so it also believes the federal government wants to increase its point of help for personally paid housing providers for the elderly.
“We are must-have health care providers,” Katzmann said in a recent appearance on the senior housing news podcast, Transform. “But because we are generally marginalized, other people are part of this system. And I think that wants to change.”
Highlights of Katzmann’s podcast interview are below, edited for longer duration and clarity. Subscribe to Transform Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud or Google Play.
Our purpose is to prevent you from spreading the disease by being proactive in its transmission. Covid-19 is the time for the SARS virus. The first in 2003. So we’ve had 17 years since the first SARS outbreak, which was transmitted through other symptomatic people. Then, when The Covid-19 exploded, other people thought, “Well, this is another SARS virus, let’s treat it the same way.”
So the whole recommendation of [USA. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] first cautioned that others who transmit the disease transmit it when they develop symptoms. So, while they had a fever, they coughed, smelled or had difficulty breathing. Juniper followed all these advice, which advised detection and temperature controls in early March.
We in a while after we started trying. For what? We looked at other examples of countries that faced them before us and found that the most successful countries seemed to be conducting normal tests while searching for contacts and isolated others with the disease.
For example, Juniper sought an advertising lab agreement to verify all of our citizens and staff, and we conducted a basic verification in our communities at access points on April 1, which would possibly do a little earlier than the maximum number of people. And what we discovered was very daunting. At the time, we had no one who had Covid-19 symptoms in our communities, not measurably.
And yet, at the time, about 50% of those two communities were positive.
Now, the vast majority of these other people were asymptomatic. 94% of our staff were asymptomatic. No sniffing, nothing. About 72% of our citizens were asymptomatic and most of them remained asymptomatic during the course of the disease.
What we have learned is that this disease has spread not only through symptomatic people, but also to presymptomatic and asymptomatic people. It’s a big difference between what we think is the case with this virus, and it has radically replaced not only Juniper’s strategy, but since then, the CDC and country strategy.
Therefore, at the heart of Juniper’s strategy opposed to Covid-19, there is proactive evidence that provides us with the knowledge needed to expand a war plan. We also use PPE well, hand washing, disinfection, cleaning, social distance and we have stopped visitors. But the most vital thing for our strategy has been testing, and we’ve been testing them since April 1.
We locate that a mixture of testing and intelligent use of EPI, i.e. masking and cohort, that is, the creation of small neighborhoods of citizens who eat in mixture, go into mixing to do things in mix, but do not necessarily combine with the network. as a whole. – is the strategy to minimize disease and death.
When we tried all our communities at first, the vast majority of them didn’t have Covid. We thought that the easiest way to hold it this way was to create a figurative “bubble” around the net to take refuge well on the site. It was not only for the residents, but also for our team members.
“Camp Wellspring” is one of those examples. Wellspring is the call we call on all of our reminiscence care communities. They have a tendency to be smaller and we believe and recognize, as others have done, that the citizens who care for reminiscence are the most difficult to protect because they have a tendency to wander and do not pay attention to isolation policies in the same way. like others.
In our first network we were able to blow up, we went out and rented a lot of recreational vehicles for small groups of staff. I talked about the cohort before. So, what it does if you need to stay with other people is that you divide your construction into small rooms (most of our buildings are already in small neighborhoods) and assign staff that can only be in the areas of one, and don’t leave. other parts of the construction.
So, if you think about a camp, Wellspring was like having your own small tent community. And they were all in his little corner. And when the staff left, they went to their RV. And it was a great laugh for other people. Most people think it was a vacation, and I’m not only talking about our staff who liked what we were doing, but also our residents. We’ve got everyone paired with T-shirts, we did all sorts of fun activities in those little neighborhoods and other people were delighted.
At the time, families and others who enjoyed could not enter the network at all. But we had to send them a lot of pictures, like he does when he sends his kids to camp.
I think this strategy is part of a series of steps you want to take to protect your residents, your staff and, frankly, your community. So that’s the resolution I took. My resolution is based on an operational strategy that we have at Juniper, which is to have as much knowledge as you can imagine to make the most productive resolutions imaginable. The tests gave us the kind of knowledge we thought we wanted to expand the most productive war plan.
Juniper is in an advantageous position for a small business. We have the ability, because we are small, to do things, and other much larger corporations would have more difficulty accessing the tests. We were able to paint from the beginning thanks to a partnership with Magnolia Labs, which provided us with the amount of evidence we needed. And that’s very, very useful.
Since checking accounts fit more, it’s not unusual in the U.S., I think there are now more controls available and more and more people are getting. And the biggest impediment right now, frankly, is not only access to quick checks, but also the check charge. Most of us in senior homes do not have a source of investment to verify our partners. Most citizens are covered through Medicare, but staff sometimes aren’t. Those with personal insurance can get it, and we qualify for personal insurance. But for the amount of checks we make, we spend about $100,000 a week. This will decrease, especially as we move on to less expensive checks and more paintings with Dascena.
But it’s a very expensive thing to do. And we were in a very fortunate position not only to be able to access the evidence, but also to have the liquidity of our trading decomposer. So I think it’s the right thing for everyone, however, other people have other reviews and have other access to resources. And I think that’s a big component of the problem.
If the federal government and state governments were to fund evidence for all, I think it would be wonderful. It would be favorable not only for us as communities, but also for us as a society. Other older people with chronic diseases are maximum, probably not only to get Covid, but also to be hospitalized with Covid. And hospital beds, especially in hotspots, are hard to find. And the cost to all of us as Covid’s hospital care company is very high. So, to the extent that it can keep our communities away from great epidemics, it protects not only us, our citizens and our businesses, but also society as a whole.
I wish I’d been as positive as some of the stories you hear. I don’t think it’s this quarter. I don’t think it’s going to end until the end of the year. While I hope to see a type of vaccine that will get its approval, if it will be scaled, if other people will be really safe, if priority will be given to the other people suitable for distribution, I cannot say.
But I see [dealing with Covid-19] at least six months, and that can be a lot more. What do we do operationally? What do we do financially? I think there are a number of things we do in the way we treat Covid.
I think we’ve all learned that the other people we serve want assistance and fitness services. And while many of us didn’t want to think about infection control as the specialized sector of our industry, or even hospitals, has done, we’ve learned to be more proactive. We want to use PPE in other tactics than ever before. And we have plenty of time to make sure our buildings remain familiar rather than institutional, despite all these new practices. From an operational point of view, infection, prevention, cleaning, disinfection, the way you organize activities, the way you deliver food, and what you do with food, all of those things have been spectacularly replaced.
Then you will see other people spend more money on PPE. In March, April and May, it was very difficult to get something and the costs you paid were much higher. It’s starting to fade, let’s see if it continues. The tests, as I mentioned earlier, are expensive. Therefore, you will have ongoing monetary costs. I who can necessarily keep the disease out of our network through intelligent infection testing and prevention, and that we will be a safe and stimulating position for others who want more care and assistance to live through the pandemic. how we shape our history and how we can communicate our successes, companies can improve and we can serve through that.
Staffing was a huge challenge to the pandemic. While communities are part of a hotspot and are experiencing epidemics, staffing is very difficult. The staff, like everyone else, are afraid. Some are in poor physical condition and move on home. Some of them have been exposed. And so, overnight, possibly his numbers will decrease. You’ll need to be in one position and you’ll have to be able to welcome more people, and you’ll need to be able to reuse members of your community. So the waiters in your dining room can become housewives. Clearly, they will not update health professionals. But we have used universal methods to make staff and education systems meet needs.
We did something fun, too. At the height of the pandemic, which for us was in April and early May, we used our sales team to start hiring staff. They’re as smart at it as they are in attracting new people.
From a financial point of view, I believe the key will be to keep our buildings safe and convince others that they are safe. Improving our occupancy rate, which we are starting to see, is sending messages correctly. I don’t know if you’ve noticed ProMatura’s recent report, however, they’ve made some paintings to show what other people need to become older people [during the pandemic]. And what they need is interesting. They need it to be clean. Therefore, it is very important to be able to show your cleaning and disinfection protocols. They need to see that you are doing the tests and would also like to receive the number one care in place; need to make sure their partner has access to normal medical care. So if you can do all those things, I think you can increase the occupancy rate, which will then improve your monetary situation.
At the end of the day, some of these prices will have to be compensated, as well as for hospitals and other places. The costs must also be offset for us. And the government wants to help in that process. We are must-have fitness care providers. But because we’re usually private people, other people are part of that system. And I think that wants to change. I think all our national associations are doing a wonderful task on our behalf to make this happen. I hope you’ve almost checked to get us a cash allowance under the CARES Act.
Then we’ll see where he’s going. I’m cautiously positive about it. Another thing that takes me into account is responsibility. I think there’s going to be a lot of prosecution. I think this is appropriate and mandatory for other people who have made an extra effort and have done their best. It’s a pandemic. There’s no explanation for why we deserve to have been able to snap hands and protect everyone. Although I will say that all of us, adding to me in particular, are incredibly dismayed that we do not perceive this disease enough at first to keep it absolutely away from our industry.
Tim likes bad jokes and smart beer. When he is not leaning on the computer of his paintings, he can discover Tim leaning on his private computer.
Senior Housing News (SHN) is the main news and data covering the housing sector for the elderly. SHN is a component of The Aging Media Network.