MercyOne hoping to see COVID case numbers go down so patient visitor restrictions can be eased (VIDEO)

MASON CITY — The president of MercyOne North Iowa Medical Center says once COVID case numbers go down, they’ll start looking at reducing some of the visitor restrictions currently in place. As of now, visitors are now allowed with any patient without some exceptions.

Rod Schlader says they closely track the number of patients they have that have had positive tests in the last seven days.  “If our occurrence rate is above 100 cases per 100,000 people, we’re still on this visitor restriction policy. Those numbers have been going up and they haven’t gotten below, they’ve gotten below 100 I think for a few days and then popped back up. They have to be below 100 for a week’s period of time before we move to our level two visitor restrictions which would allow one visitor per patient.”

Schlader says the visitor restrictions have been difficult for both patients and staff.   “We’re working on that currently. We just rolled out some changes we’re going to make in our emergency room. Part of our problem was we didn’t know who the primary care contact was, so we’re getting that information right away when a patient is coming through the emergency room. We’re going to ask that primary contact to be the main spokesperson for the rest of the family, which doesn’t always happen with family dynamics, so it’s a little complicated.”

Schlader made his comments during the weekly City of Mason City COVID-19 press conference Wednesday afternoon as you heard on our radio stations. View the entire press conference below