South Carolina hospitals changing their visitors’ policies as the number of Covid-19 cases across the state surge like crazy

Many South Carolina hospitals decided to change their visitors’ policies and many other are expected to follow this trend.

Visitors’ policies change comes as a result of the increasing number of Covid-19 cases as the Delta variant spread across the state like no other.

Among the first to change restrict the visitors are Lowcountry hospitals.

“It’s kind of like we’re going back a year ago, to be honest with you,” said Patrick Downes, CEO of East Cooper Medical Center. “Unfortunately, with the Delta variant, we are seeing a lot more infections in our community right now.”

Health leaders at East Cooper Medical Center informed about their new restrictive plans following their meeting on Tuesday.

“We’re allowing two visitors per patient,” Downes said. “We are asking our patients to name those two visitors.”

The rule will only apply for non-Covid-19 patients. Those infected with the virus will not be allowed to accept visitors. The same policy is now followed by the Trident Medical Center and Roper St. Francis Healthcare.

“We are re-implementing many, if not all of the precautions that we had previously put into place,” said Dr. Mitchell Siegan, Chief Medical Officer and Vice President of Acute Care at Roper St. Francis.

Dr. Siegen says they decided to stick to this rule because there is a huge difference among latest Covid-19 cases and those seen months or a year ago. The first reason that differs these patients is their age, while the other is the Delta variant already proven to be far more transmittable compared to all other variants known so far.

Trident Medical Center told ABC News 4 of its 47 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, more than half are under the age of 40 and most are unvaccinated.

Health experts recently started saying that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. This term was broadly adopted and now is used in every state. Doctors are very frustrated from those refusing to get the vaccine claiming those groups of people are responsible for the latest surge.