The state’s health department is permitting scheduled, outdoor visitation at residential care facilities, and has prescribed protocols for interactions with older residents who are most likely to die from coronavirus infection.

Staff at facilities are required to greet visitors outside in order to perform temperature checks and ensure that visitors are wearing masks. Employees will also take down the visitors’ information to enable contact tracing, and will escort them to and from the visitation.

If the person receiving the visit has symptoms of COVID-19, or the facility has not waited for 14 days following an outbreak, there will be no visitation. It is a suggestion that the facility communicate the terms of the visit and the expectations about behavior before the visitors arrive.

“We know that these restrictions — and the resulting isolation — have been hard on the residents in these facilities,” said Randy Kuykendall of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “But we know the restrictions, while hard, helped minimize the impact of outbreaks.”

The department may suspend outdoor visitations for facilities with outbreaks or if cases of COVID-19 increase generally. Compassionate care and end-of-life visits are still permitted on an individual basis.

“Access to outdoor visitation should not be viewed as a permanent relaxation of COVID-19 precautions,” CDPHE warned.