B.C. wants COVID-positive and double-vaccinated people to be able to stay together in the same hospital room.
Officials say the policy is because hospitals are getting a lot of new patients.
As a result of a record number of people going to the hospital, people with COVID-19 are being put in the same room as those who have been double-vaccinated against the virus.
Dr. Bonnie Henry, the B.C. Provincial Health Officer confirmed the policy at a Friday news conference when she answered a specific question about the Fraser Health Authority’s policy use.
It’s not clear if the policy is only for hospitals in Fraser Health, which is the most significant healthcare authority in the province with 12 hospitals. It’s also not clear which hospitals have the policy in place.
During Friday’s news conference, Fraser Health spokespeople answered questions about the “cohorting” policy, but when asked about specifics, they refused to answer, instead pointing to the given answers.
It is called “cohorting,” meaning grouping patients together for disease management.
When Henry spoke at the news conference, he said that the protocol was to “maximize space” in health care facilities because of the more infectious Omicron variant, making more people go to the hospital.
“That is an infection prevention and control team decision made at a hospital-by-hospital and, actually, room-by-room and ward-by-ward, basis,” he stated.
Henry said that extra precautions would be taken if patients who had been double-vaccinated were put in the same room as patients who had COVID.
It’s called “droplet precautions,” and Fraser Health says that COVID-positive patients’ beds have to be at least two meters away from any other patients’ beds.
There will also be no sharing rooms between COVID-positive people and people who have a weak immune system. They will have to be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic in order to share rooms.
People who have a lot of symptoms will use the COVID-19-only cohorts.
The memo that explained the new guidelines said they were put in place because the COVID-19 virus was changing. This virus usually causes mild illness, especially in people who have been fully vaccinated, so the new guidelines were implemented because of these shifts.
As Health Minister Adrian Dix said on Friday, “Cohorting everyone in a hospital is much more difficult when there are a lot of people in it.”
“When you have a lot of people in the hospital, you have to manage within the space you have and ensure that infection control stays high — and that’s what our teams are doing in hospitals across B.C.”
Health officials said they would not concentrate on contact tracing at the and would change how they managed COVID-19.
Health experts were not happy with the decision to put people who have COVID-19 in the same hospital room as people who have been fully vaccinated. This is because there is strong evidence that someone who has two vaccine doses is still at risk of getting the more infectious Omicron variant.
People who have two shots are still considered fully vaccinated by the province.
