Effective Friday, March 16 at 7 a.m., temporary visitor restrictions will be lifted at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, including the Winston-Salem campus and Davie, Lexington and Wilkes medical centers.
The visitor restrictions for children age 12 and under have been in place since Jan. 12 to help control the spread of flu.
“While we continue monitoring the influenza virus as it continues to circulate in our area, we’ve seen the rates decrease steadily in the past several weeks,” said Larry B. Givner, M.D., professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. “We feel it’s appropriate to lift these temporary visitor restrictions now, since spending time with healthy loved ones, including children, is important for many of our patients.”
Before deciding to lift restrictions, infection prevention teams from Wake Forest Baptist and five other health systems – Atrium Health (formerly Carolinas HealthCare System), Cone Health, High Point Regional Health, Novant Health and Randolph Health – coordinated to make sure all were seeing similar downward trends in flu cases to warrant lifting restrictions at all hospitals.
These six health systems are lifting visitor restrictions at the same time and in the same way they enacted them two months ago because they share the same geographic area and have similar rates of influenza in the community.
The spread of influenza can be decreased by practicing good hand hygiene and staying home from school or work if experiencing fever.
As always, any visitors and family members coming to Wake Forest Baptist should be healthy – free from fever, cough, colds, or stomach virus symptoms – when visiting patients.
Media Relations
Joe McCloskey: jmcclosk@wakehealth.edu, 336-716-1273
Eryn Johnson: eryjohns@wakehealth.edu, 336-713-8228