Excerpted from January 17, 2022 message to the community, inspirahealthnetwork.org/covid19

Hello, so, we hit our highest number ever of COVID patients in the house, as well as total number of patients. That means that our three facilities were very, very busy. I know that that has created a lot of stress for many of you. Obviously, the red visitation does not allow you to see your loved ones and I certainly have heard from many of you about the struggles of that, and I understand how difficult that is. We have been able to fill volunteer slots to have volunteers come in from our staff throughout the organization and be able to provide FaceTime and other opportunities for you to speak to your loved one, but when you can’t be there, I know it causes a lot of stress and I am tremendously sorry for that.

We are starting to see the numbers go down, numbers of COVID patients, that is. Our total volume continues to remain very, very high and our emergency rooms are very, very busy. All of this is just as a reminder that this Omicron variant is very, very virulent. The transmission rate, while it has dropped from the 1.9 it was to 1.25 this week, it still remains over one, and that remains, that means that we still need to make sure that we are masking, we are washing our hands, we’re remaining socially distanced wherever possible.

Appointments can be scheduled for vaccines and boosters and again, we have daily appointments available, so please check the website for those. The testing, obviously, you’ve heard that the White House has issued new rules that allow health insurance to cover eight tests per person per month for a total of 32 tests that will be covered under your health insurance plan. And that’s a tremendous relief for people to have to know that they can get that. The only challenge is, of course, we have a shortage of tests. We are doing our best to meet your needs and we’ll continue to do so…