By By Dan Hounsell

The nation’s senior living communities have struggled mightily for the last year as the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the lives of residents and upended every aspect of facility operations, including the ability of family members to visit their loved ones. Now, the hope for a return to something resembling normalcy has arrived.

Senior living industry groups said they are hopeful the visitation rules for nursing homes released Wednesday by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will spur states to make similar recommendations for assisted living communities soon, according to McKnight’s Senior Living. CMS says COVID-19 vaccinations and a decrease in infections and deaths led it to issue new guidelines. Released in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the guidance calls for limitations on visits in nursing homes to be put in place for:

• unvaccinated residents, if the COVID-19 county positivity rate is greater than 10 percent and less than 70 percent of residents in the facility are fully vaccinated;

• residents with confirmed COVID-19 infection, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, until they have met the criteria to discontinue transmission-based precautions; or

• residents in quarantine, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, until they have met criteria for release from quarantine.