MIDLAND, Texas — Senior center employees are rolling up their sleeves to make sure everything is in tip top shape for their new visitors.
After being closed 16 months, seniors can now get back to the activities they love this month.
"We took all the information that we got from around the state and then we looked at it locally for our situation and looked at the size of our buildings for the senior centers, determined how many people safely could be in each building and social distance and then what kind of cleaning protocols we needed to have in place," said Tonya Eckert, manager of Midland senior centers.
There are capacity limits for each area in the centers.
"We have a puzzle table, two, three or four people can be at that area. Our dining room, we can have up to 30 people in there," Eckert said.
And trust me, there's a whole lot of that cleaning.
It's every afternoon, throughout the day and all day Fridays when the centers are closed.
"We talked to our local medical professionals as well to make sure that we were in line with a balanced approach and something that was safe but that the seniors could start to congregate again," Eckert said.
In getting feedback from seniors what they wanted most was to be back with friends.
"Isolation is very difficult for seniors and for anybody for that matter and so it's really a balanced approach of really encouraging safety measures and making sure that everybody is doing everything that they can to make sure that their neighbor is safe, while being able to continue with life," Eckert said.
Tonya says they are in constant communication with the city's medical community to keep a pulse on COVID-19.
She says there isn't a certain marker that will allow them to fully open or even to make them close down. They're just monitoring the status of the virus on a daily basis.
