WHEN THE WHITE SWAN COMES HOME TO ROOST:

NEW LONDON -- The mail is taking a day or two longer to get to residents at Woodcrest Village these days, but it's not the fault of the Postal Service.

"We keep all mail and packages quarantined outside for 48 hours because we don't have the cleaning products to wipe them down. We're running out of cloth wipes, and I think we're down to two cans of Lysol," said Bethany Brenner, executive director of the 44-unit facility, which was started by her mother in 1989.

That's the least of their worries, however. The facility is running out of protective gear like gowns and masks that the staff needs when dealing with residents who have symptoms of COVID-19 -- including the 11 residents who live in the memory care unit and can't always understand what is happening.

"We were having a meeting discussing this. The health services director said the gowns have to be a moisture barrier, so you can't just use paper. ... But we just received a bunch of paper tablecloths that have a plastic barrier; I said, 'Maybe if we start duct-taping them, we can use them as gowns,' " Brenner said Wednesday. "We've resorted to eBay, wherever we can get anything. We went online to order welder face shields."

At the heart of their problem is the lack of tests to know who actually has COVID-19 and who has only an unrelated cough and fever. Without that knowledge, they have to assume that every person with symptoms is "a positive" -- infected with coronavirus -- and act accordingly.

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