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BALTIMORE – At this time of year, the Lord Baltimore Hotel was regularly full of guests: conference visitors, football enthusiasts and even ghost hunters looking to communicate with the spirits that frequented its corridors.
Today, the hotel’s ballroom has been remodeled into a COVID-19 center. Under 3 giant chandeliers, city staff and University of Maryland medical formula staff receive calls from positive citizens to the coronavirus who want a quarantine site or physical care services with patients. some of them homeless, who want a job to stay.
Hotels around the world are used to isolate others suspected of having COVID-19. Travelers to Singapore, Australia and Taiwan directly from the airport to hostels and hotels for 14 days to prevent transmission of the virus. But this is not the case at the Lord Baltimore Hotel, which is now the city’s classification, respite and isolation (TRI) center. Since May, more than six hundred people have passed through their doors and all have stayed for free.
The project, which is a partnership between the city and the University of Maryland Medical System, is funded through the $103 million Baltimore earned from the federal government in investments of the CARES Act. Although those dollars expire in December, city officials plan to look for FEMA investments to keep it open longer.
“Our commitment is to be here as long as necessary,” said Chuck Callahan of the University of Maryland Medical Center, which divides his time between the hotel and the conference center, which is also a center and facility.
Visitors included Leon Love, a 68-year-old Baltimore resident who stayed at the hotel last month. He tested positive for COVID-19 last month after attending a friend’s visit; He noticed the inability to savor while eating a bean soup. Instead of threatening to infect his family, with which he lived, he went to Lord Baltimore. He attributes the intelligent attention he gained there for absolutely helping him against the disease.
“Talk about not missing out, ” he said.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Baltimore leaders learned that others living in homeless shelters and other teams would want a position to isolate themselves if they tested positive for COVID-19 or were exposed to the virus. . Organizers wanted a larger, more equipped central defense to care for others with health problems, so they contacted the University of Maryland medical formula for help.
Callahan, vice president of population fitness at the University of Maryland Medical Center, said the medical formula had approached Lord Baltimore’s owners before the pandemic to get overflow beds if the hospital ran out of space. But that didn’t take position at the end; has a position for homeless people and positive citizens in COVID-19.
This is not the first time the city has operated on a quarantine facility. For centuries, Baltimore operated a quarantine hospital at Hawkins Point, maintaining the site of its landfill. Whether faced with outbreaks of yellow fever, typhus or smallpox, citizens have been sent south of Baltimore to avoid infecting other citizens. The conditions were not optimal. In 1899, according to Records of the Baltimore Sun, an officer complained that the sick remained in the same position as others who might have been in poor health, allowing the disease to spread.
120 years later, the government has conscientiously configured Lord Baltimore’s site to isolate other people with health problems, who remain in single rooms. The University of Maryland’s Infection Prevention Team has designated a “hot zone” and “cold zone” formula on the hotel floors. The hot areas, where the other people who isolate the other remain, move away from the elevators with two layers of plastic. The elevator bank is now a placement and extraction station where robes and protective masks are placed.
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Customers do not enter through the wonderful lobby; for protection reasons, they arrive by the loading dock. The medium is also sending special cars to pick up other people on the net so they don’t have to worry in all likelihood of infecting an Uber or taxi driver.
The staff calls citizens “customers” and not “patients”, in a component to emphasize the fact that they do not provide comprehensive medical care at the hotel. If someone takes a worse turn, they will be transferred to a nearby hospital. there have been no deaths at the site due to COVID, a resident has died for reasons unrelated to COVID. Staff said they may not disclose any data on the cause of death
Referrals come from hospitals, homeless shelters and rehabilitation centers, any position where others with COVID-19 find it difficult to isolate themselves from others.
“Everyone is welcome here,” said Molly Rice, a nurse at the University of Maryland and project manager.
Customers do not want insurance, identification or documents proving their citizenship. The staff strives to accommodate Spanish-speaking residents, who live with several generations under one roof, with the greatest threat of transmission. Site manager Robert “Bobby” Harris, a city painter, said he consulted with the local restaurant Cocina Luchadoras on paintings about soups and other dishes that might be tastier for them. Nurses helped families prepare for virtual learning once school began.
In addition to helping citizens isolate themselves from the pandemic, projects like Lord Baltimore provide much-needed profit expansion for hotel owners and jobs for their staff.
In Lord Baltimore, the city’s new company allowed CEO Onahlea Shimunek to hire 20 of the 60 workers she had previously laid off in the pandemic when vacancies exploded.
The retreation includes executive chef Beth Dinice, who is grateful to be back at work; had just moved to Baltimore when the pandemic occurred.
Since May, she and the rest of the hotel staff have been busy preparing 3 meals a day for visitors living upstairs. This is not the same food as always: laughter and cakes for weddings and other events, but comforting dishes like fried blue catfish, meatloaf and waffles. Meals are delivered in brown bags with the room number written on them, similar to room service. Dinice knows she did well when they call her to ask for a few seconds.
Staff say they treat all visitors like anyone else who came to the hotel. When a circle of relatives with young children ordered ice for breakfast, they handed it over. “If anyone needs ice cream, for God’s sake, we will give them, ” said Shimunek.
The goal, they say, is to create such a safe and comfortable environment for those who remain there, those who describe as “heroes”. “I think it’s a vital thing that those other people are doing online because the goal of isolation is to protect the network,” said Amanda Rosencrans, Baltimore City Health Service worker and clinical director of the project.
Although he is “full of pride” for what his staff has been able to achieve in recent months, Shimunek is involved in the effect of the hotel’s passage as a quarantine center on his image. He asks, “What will other people do?”I hope other people think we’ve done something good for the city of Baltimore at a really tricky time.
Last month, check-in in his 15th room on the ground floor overlooking the city made Leon Love a global traveler who had just arrived in Baltimore from the airport.
For 14 days, it was based on sheets with the largest number of cables and on television. Meals: at 7 a. m. , noon and five in the afternoon. – were the main light of his days, especially once his sense of taste returned. “Food like no other. “
At one point, in the middle of an episode of COVID’s brain freeze, he called the front table to ask for an alarm clock at five in the morning (he was told to rest). And when he started to feel better, the city’s workers on the site even helped him locate his own home, so he no longer had to live with members of the family circle.
He doesn’t think he can stay in Lord Baltimore normally, but he’d love to come back eventually, this time out of sheer gratitude.
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