Josie Pirozzoli was visiting her mother in a Florida nursing home, The Hawthorne Inn every day before the pandemic began. 

Pirozzoli said there is nothing more important to her 94-year-old mother than family.

However, after the state's emergency rule, which did not allow visitors, Pirozzoli said that she has only been seeing her mother through a window or on the computer.

She said that even those visits are short, they are also heartbreaking.

"What I pray for every time I have one of those visits is that she still recognizes me. That's what I pray for," she was quoted in a report.

Pirozzoli might be far from visiting her mother face-to-face again with more COVID-19 cases increasing at nursing homes in 23 "hot spot" counties of Florida.

Around 85 rapid testing machines will be deployed immediately to test staff.

Florida nursing homes have closely guarded the area since March by banning family visits, isolating infected victims in separate wings, and now requiring staff to be tested every two weeks.

A county is considered a hot spot if, in the last week, it reported three or more new cases of COVID-19 in a nursing home, has inadequate access to testing, and had at least one new resident due to COVID-19 or had at least one new confirmed or suspected case of COVID-19 among staff.

This was according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data.

Testings will be done in hopes to open the door to the possibility that visitors could return to nursing homes where infections are under control.

"We want to make sure that there's no COVID inside the nursing home, and then once we see that for two weeks, our recommendation will be to permit visitation and require testing of the visitors," CMS Administrator Seema Verma in a conference was quoted in a report.

CMS said earlier this week that it will adopt a new set of rules. This rule will require staff in nursing homes in counties where the positivity rate is above five percent, be tested at least weekly.

This is seen to curb the spread of COVID-19 infection.

Currently, CMS only "recommends" that testing is done regularly.

Federal Program Goal

CMS said it is aiming to deploy 15,000 of the new testing machines to counties.

Around 636 will be shipped this week. It will also implement "financial penalties" for homes that basic protocols like hand-washing and mask-wearing are violated.

Verma said that they will also be testing nursing homes that are experiencing an increase in COVID-19 cases.

The first round of machines will be distributed to 85 nursing homes, in the following counties in Florida: 6 in Miami-Dade, 7 in Broward, 1 in Monroe, and 15 in Palm Beach, a report said.

This was funded by  a $5 billion CARES Act program. 

In a CMS press release, they said the new staff testing requirement will support efforts to keep infection from spreading in nursing homes by identifying possible asymptomatic carriers.

Florida nursing homes have 2,557 residents and staff at long-term care facilities in Florida have died of COVID-19, as of July 24.

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