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Mayor Jon Mitchell announced Wednesday that nursing home managers are now ordered to follow various sanitation and social distancing standards. It includes prohibiting all group activities and communal dining and requiring all staff to perform adequate hand washing.
“We really have to make sure that all of these facilities are doing everything they can to protect their residents,” Mitchell said. “We expect them to but we’re also gonna trust but verify under the circumstances.”
The mayor’s office said “frequent” surprise inspections will be done to make sure nursing home managers are complying with the order. If they’re not, the facility could be fined $500 a day per violation.
“We’d rather not get to that point but we can’t mess around with this,” Mitchell said.
The New Bedford Department of Health has seven health inspectors that have been reassigned from other duties to focus on the COVID-19 outbreak and some of them will be assigned to enforce the new nursing home measures.
The city has a total of 33 confirmed coronavirus cases, up from six cases a week ago.
