It's been two months since people could enter nursing homes in Florida to see their loved ones.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis held a meeting Wednesday regarding long-term care facilities and says he's exploring options to get longterm care facilities prepped to start accepting visitors again.
There's no timeline as of yet, but the governor says he's encouraged by testing numbers, which are low in comparison to other states.
He says the diligence of both the Healthcare Administration and the Florida Department of Health (DOH) helped contribute by being aggressive against the virus.
"Senior citizens from the beginning we have known have been the most vulnerable... we made it a priority from the beginning," Desantis said.
DeSantis said that the biggest risk to the patients at these longterm care facilities has been staff bringing in and carrying the virus. The state has over 200,000 staff members across the state and those carrying the virus may be asymptomatic.
The governor says mandatory screenings of nursing home staff and vendors very early on helped to reduce the number of those high-risk individuals who have tested positive.
Even now, DeSantis says there continues to be protocols put in place to protect our state's most vulnerable including a new DOH testing plan that includes surveillance testing and financial incentives for healthcare providers.
The state has also begun testing those living at nursing homes if/when they visit a hospital, regardless of the reason that they are there.
"We are requiring hospital testing prior to discharge to a long-term care facility even if you're in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID-19," DeSantis said. "They should be tested before they're sent back, that is being very cautious and putting safety first...."
There have also been several sites that have opened that will serve as a transition point for people that have been diagnosed with COVID-19 that may no longer need to be admitted to hospital but are not quite ready to go back to their nursing home residences without isolating.
Dolphin Pointe Health Care in Jacksonville is one of those sites.
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"If you take a COVID positive resident put them into a long-term care facility that is not equipped to isolate with negative pressure according to federal guidelines, you end up creating a major transmission vector," DeSantis explained. "They will infect other residents and could lead to an outbreak and more hospitalizations."
Last week, DeSantis said there were 17 patients at Dolphin Pointe Health Care and that the facility was expecting to take in more.