Dining Room Changes – Menno Apartments

Residents of Terrace East and Primrose Gardens received memos this week informing them of floor-by-floor dining in the dining rooms. Terrace West and Pavilion dining rooms are closed due to outbreak (TW) and enhanced monitoring (Pavilion).

In cooperation with Fraser Health, our team at Menno Place seeks to understand any points of concern with respect to transmission of COVID within our Independent and Assisted Living apartments. The dining experience in our apartments has been identified as requiring increased social distancing in order to provide the safest dining experience for our residents. In the Terrace East outbreak, the Medical Health Officer isolated all residents in the apartment building because all floors in the building were represented within short distance from the index case in the dining room. This isolation for all residents became significantly difficult for the residents as the outbreak transmission progressed. It is our hope that by serving meals to one floor at a time with enhanced cleaning between meals, we can continue the benefits of socializing during meals while mitigating the need to isolate the entire apartment building should a resident in the apartment contract COVID.

We recognize that this is difficult for residents. We have weighed this hardship against the hardship of isolation that was recently experienced by our Terrace East residents. At this time, with the prevalence of COVID in our community and the regional orders for Fraser Valley East, we have decided to put this floor-by-floor physically distanced plan into place for all dining rooms.

Floor-by-floor dining will begin on October 28th in Primrose Gardens and November 2nd in Terrace East.

At this time, there is no COVID exposure for residents in either Terrace East or Primrose Gardens.