MUSKINGUM COUNTY, Ohio- With all the dispute that has been going on about mandating the vaccine, it has been officially required for all medical facilities.
The Supreme Court ruled last Thursday that all 10.5 million health care workers around the country are required to have a vaccine while working inside a health facility that accepts medicaid and medicare.
“Currently about 70 percent of all the staff at Genesis are vaccinated and we’ve also given approved exemptions to about 18 percent and most of those exemptions are religious exemptions. So we still have a certain percentage of our staff that we’re working on to be able to go through that process,” Matt Perry, CEO of Genesis Healthcare System stated.
This mandate that is required by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is in focus to keep the healthcare workforce safe.
Perry said that as of this morning, there are 73 COVID patients who are currently inpatient in the hospital.
“We’re experiencing the highest load of COVID that we have at any point during the pandemic for severe COVID. It is almost all, at this point of time, almost all the cases are Omicron,” Perry said. “You keep hearing that Omicron is not as severe or it’s not as virulent version of COVID, which is true, but it’s so much more effectionist that the assured number of people is so much greater that you still get a lot of people in the hospital really really sick and you still get a lot of people dying from it.”
Perry expressed how the Genesis staff have been doing an amazing job taking care of the community and wouldn’t want to lose any employee due to the vaccine mandate.
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid is also requiring that all medical facilities are vaccinated or file for exemption by March 15th, 2022.
