All five of those people are now recovering, a spokesman for Elderwood confirmed Tuesday. The nursing home is temporarily closed to indoor, in-person visitors. This appears to be in line with the state Department of Health’s guidance for nursing homes where there’s a high risk of COVID-19 transmission.

“The guidance is based on where a COVID-19 staff member works within a facility, if their work is not limited to a single unit, visitation for all units must be suspended,” said Chuck Hayes, Elderwood’s vice president of marketing and communications.

Compassionate care visits are permitted at all times, according to the DOH.

The DOH updated its guidance on surveillance testing last month. Operators of nursing homes are no longer required to test or arrange for routine testing for COVID-19 for employees, though daily symptom screenings are still required. Hayes said the nursing home has routine testing protocols in place for all unvaccinated staff. Fully vaccinated staff are only required to get tested if it’s confirmed that they’ve been exposed to someone with a confirmed case of COVID-19.

Hayes said whenever a case of COVID-19 is found in the facility, all staff and residents are tested.

The vast majority of the nursing home’s residents and staff have been vaccinated against COVID-19, though recent research has shown that even vaccinated people may be able to spread the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which is now the dominant strain of the virus in the U.S. It’s rare for vaccinated people to get “breakthrough” infections, but when it happens, the vaccines largely prevent serious illness, according to the Associated Press.

It was not clear Tuesday how the virus was able to spread through the nursing home or whether those who tested positive were vaccinated. Hayes said he did not immediately have that information.

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Vaccines change outlook

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For many months, those who were older and living in congregate living facilities were at high risk of dying or becoming severely ill from COVID-19. As of June, at least 172,000 people living or working in nursing homes across the U.S. had died from COVID-19, including more than 15,000 people in New York, according to the New York Times.

Nursing home staff and residents were among the first to be eligible for vaccination against COVID-19. Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine in May, based on immunization records from residents of 280 nursing homes across 21 states, suggests that since COVID-19 vaccines were authorized for use in the U.S., the number of new infections found among both vaccinated and unvaccinated residents has declined. Of the infections found, most were asymptomatic.

In a letter to the editor to the medical journal, researchers Elizabeth White, Xiaofei Yang, Carolyn Blackman, Richard Feifer, Stefan Gravenstein and Vincent Mor noted that they believe surveillance testing and vaccination programs should continue.

“Our observation of a reduced incidence of infection among unvaccinated residents suggests that robust vaccine coverage among residents and staff, together with the continued use of face masks and other infection-control measures, is likely to afford protection for small numbers of unvaccinated residents in congregate settings,” the researchers wrote. “Still, the continued observation of incident cases after vaccination highlights the critical need for ongoing vaccination programs and surveillance testing in nursing homes to mitigate future outbreaks.”

The vast majority of residents at Elderwood of Uihlein have been vaccinated. As of Tuesday, 97% of the nursing home’s residents and 80% of the staff have been vaccinated, according to Hayes.