Covid’s Effect on IHC

Wally Smith:
COVID. COVID shocked everybody’s system. How did it affect you guys?

Patrick Lam:
I think the biggest misconception about COVID was the fact that it had on senior housing and healthcare. You heard almost every day in 2021 that COVID hit a lot of nursing homes throughout the United States of America. But really, it really just hurt nursing homes. It didn’t really hurt assisted living facilities or memory care facilities. And that’s what we’re really proud of. Most of our communities went through COVID without much issues. Maybe there was one or two deaths, but definitely not an outbreak or anybody leaving any facilities because of COVID.

Wally Smith:
I know with the nursing homes, a lot of people felt like, “Okay, we’re going to bring mom home now. We’re not going to leave or we’ll just figure it out. We’ll take care of the nursing ourselves or whatever.” It was so messy for so many. So you didn’t have to uproot people for the most part out of their homes in their assisted living? That’s great.

Patrick Lam:
I think one thing you point out is compare assisted living and memory care facilities to nursing homes is it’s a completely different staff. We have 25 usually full-time employees that only work in our community or facility. When you’re in a nursing home-

Wally Smith:
The ratio that you have-

Patrick Lam:
I’m sorry?

Wally Smith:
What ratio do you have, staff to residents?

Patrick Lam:
I think it’s about one to three, one to two and a half.

Wally Smith:
Really? That’s excellent.

Patrick Lam:
But one thing I wanted to say was with nursing homes, you have a lot of part-time employees. And that’s really why there were outbreaks, because you have a nurse that came from a hospital in the morning shift to go to their afternoon shift to hit the nursing home. And that’s where you saw a lot of spreads throughout the country.