SPRINGFIELD — Baystate Health will put up a tent Wednesday on the lawn at its Springfield campus so employees can take socially distanced meal breaks.
Baystate is also reconfiguring its indoor break rooms and repurposing classrooms and other spaces as additional break areas a week after discovering an in-house coronavirus outbreak linked to an employee recently returned from a vacation to a virus “hot spot” being part of a group of employees sitting around and eating without masks on.
From that break room, the virus was passed to patients and to other employees in an undisclosed unit of the hospital.
Dr. Mark Keroack, president and CEO of Baystate Health, said Tuesday that the health system has also imposed travel restrictions on employees mirroring those announced last week by Gov. Charlie Baker. People arriving home having visited places outside New England, New York, New Jersey and Hawaii must self-quarantine for 14 days or provide a negative result on a coronavirus test administered within 72 hours.
Baystate has also linked rules about mask wearing and distancing to its employee discipline program. The rules were not linked to discipline before.
“I think there is a lesson. You hate to be the cautionary tale,” Keroack said in a phone interview with reporters at The Republican. “Nobody should think ever that they are in a place where the virus is not present.”
With 12,000 employees, Baystate Health is the largest employer in the region.
Keroack said he is generally proud of how the organization has handled the coronavirus pandemic. But he said discipline slipped as the pandemic wore on and as Baystate, like the rest of society, began to return to normal.
“You don’t want to be the next example of how asymptomatic spread can lead to a lot of trouble,” said Keroack, an infectious disease specialist who worked on HIV/AIDS care before moving into executive positions.
He shared updated numbers Tuesday concerning the outbreak. There are 40 positive cases, including 26 employees and 14 patients.
Of the patients, seven are being treated in the hospital and seven are outpatients.
The people who are being treated in the hospital are all being treated for the ailment that sent them to the hospital in the first place in addition to the coronavirus.
None of the 26 employees are hospitalized.
The number of cases linked to the lunchroom increased by four from Monday, when Keroack first went public about the outbreak.
That’s out of 117 patients who cycled through the unit from July 15-23. There were 90 employees assigned to the unit and another 100 visited the unit for 15 minutes or longer.
Keroack said most of the results of coronavirus tests on all those people are in. But Baystate is still working on contact tracing, finding out all the people those positive cases have been in contact with, calling them and getting that next round of people tested.
"You keep going until you find a ring of negatives around every case," he said.
The state Department of Public Health is doing its own contact tracing of coronavirus cases. Information on that process is available on the state’s website.
Keroack was careful not to identify the hospital unit where the outbreak occurred. To Baystate patients worried they were exposed, he said that if you were a patient in the impacted unit, Baystate would have contacted you already.
“This is about how we make all of your units safe and how we learn and get better from all of this,” Keroack said.
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