Queens VA nursing home set to resume in-person visits
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Eileen Morales (left) and her father Charles Kennedy, a retired Army sergeant, will reunite for the first time in more than 13 months when Kennedy’s long-term care facility loosens visitor restrictions April 14. Photos courtesy of Morales
By David Brand
A Queens nursing home for military veterans is set to loosen its visitor restrictions, allowing residents to see their loved ones face-to-face for the first time in 13 months, officials said Friday.
The St. Albans Community Living Center, currently home to 113 veterans, has been on lockdown since the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020, but will open back up to visitors on Wednesday, April 14, said spokesperson Michael Drake.
“We are ready and anxious to begin visitation on April 14,” Drake said.
About 97 percent of residents and 80 percent of staff members have received the COVID-19 vaccine, enabling the safe resumption of in-person visits, he said.
Family and friends will be allowed to stop by for 50 minutes at a time and must wear a mask. Visitors are not required to be vaccinated and no more than two visitors may enter a room at a time, Drake said.
He cautioned that the plan depends on controlling the rate of COVID-19 in the area and at the facility. The CLC will announce changes to the reopening plan on social media, he said.
The decision to welcome back visitors comes a few weeks after New York loosened restrictions on state nursing homes where COVID-19 once surged, killing thousands of older adult residents. At least 134 residents have died of COVID across the VA New York Harbor Healthcare System, which includes the St. Albans CLC, according to federal data. The network has two other campuses in Bay Ridge and the Lowest East Side.
The Northport VA nursing home in Nassau County opened to visitors on March 31.
Charles Kennedy, a Sunnyside and Corona resident, beat COVID-19 in April 2020.
The reopening plan comes as a huge relief to Eileen Morales, a New Jersey resident who hasn’t seen her father in more than 13 months. She said she recently learned about the visitation restart from a social worker.
“Not to be with him for so long has been really challenging,” Morales said. “It’s been scary, and not having that face to face, that emotion, has been hard.”
Morales’ dad, 81-year-old retired Army sergeant Charles Kennedy, beat COVID-19 in April of last year and avoided a recurrence before finally getting vaccinated in February, she said.
He served in the army from 1965 to 1968, and settled in Sunnyside and Corona after his honorable discharge. Kennedy graduated with an English degree from St. John’s and a master’s from Fordham before working as an offset printer and clerk in the comptroller for the currency’s office in Manhattan. He retired in the late 1990s.
Morales has spoken with Kennedy by phone throughout the pandemic and said she will drive to Queens from New Jersey as soon as visitation resumes.
“It makes me feel a million times better,” she said.
