After 11 Rock Springs hospital employees tested positive for the coronavirus last week, hundreds more have been swabbed for testing.
According to a news release from Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County, those 11 employees had been diagnosed with the virus on Thursday and are safely isolating at home.
There has been no exposure of the virus between patients and hospital staff, though, the hospital said.
“We are doing our best to test as many patients as possible and to work very closely with Public Health to perform contact tracing,” hospital CEO Irene Richardson said in the news release. “So far, we have tested almost 4,000 people in Sweetwater County. We are doing our best to keep our patients, staff and community safe.”
To help with contact tracing, the hospital staff have taken steps to track visitors coming into the hospital and specialty clinics. When arriving at any of those locations, visitors are asked to sign in with the time and date of their arrival.
Patients can be easily tracked through physician or procedure appointment schedules, should the need arise. Everyone entering a hospital facility is asked to use a face covering and apply hand sanitizer upon entering and leaving.
The hospital has implemented multiple precautions to ensure the health and safety of visitors, patients, staff and the community, such as:
- All hospital employees must wear masks at the hospital and must remain 6 feet apart, unless involved in direct patient care;
- Employees are not allowed to eat together in the hospital café or break rooms. The hospital café remains closed to the public.
- The hospital’s employee health department is randomly selecting about 50 staff members weekly to volunteer for coronavirus sampling. Hundreds of employees have been swabbed;
- Sweetwater Memorial has heightened its already CDC-compliant cleaning standards. These cleaning standards apply to all patient areas, visitor areas and clinics;
- Visitation restrictions remain in place.
