MUSC issues new COVID-19-related restrictions and guidelines

CHARLESTON, S.C. (March 10, 2020)–MUSC is discouraging visits by people who do not have to be on site, especially people who were recently in an area where there’s been a high level of transmission of the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19.

Effective today, MUSC will screen all visitors at points of entry to the hospital. Specifically, this will be a symptom-based screen where we will ask visitors if they’ve experienced fever, cough or shortness of breath in the previous 48 hours. For any visitor who is well and hasn’t experienced any of these symptoms, they’ll be able to visit our hospital as they normally would.

For visitors who are experiencing these symptoms, we will kindly ask them not to visit MUSC Health and to leave and head back home and recover there. MUSC will work with symptomatic visitors with extenuating circumstances such as having a gravely ill loved one, by asking them to wear a mask throughout their time in the hospital.Children under 12 are strongly discouraged, but not prohibited, from visiting patients.

MUSC is now prohibiting all MUSC-sponsored and affiliated international travel until further notice. That affects students, residents, fellows, faculty members and all other MUSC and MUSC Health employees. MUSC is also strongly discouraging out-of-state travel for employees, students, residents and fellows, encouraging them to use alternative ways of communicating and meeting, such as teleconferencing.

For the latest information on COVID-19 in South Carolina, visit the website of the Department of Health and Environmental Control, which is leading the response for the state.

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About MUSC

Founded in 1824 in Charleston, MUSC is the oldest medical school in the South as well as the state’s only integrated, academic health sciences center with a unique charge to serve the state through education, research and patient care. Each year, MUSC educates and trains more than 3,000 students and 800 residents in six colleges: Dental Medicine, Graduate Studies, Health Professions, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy. The state’s leader in obtaining biomedical research funds, in fiscal year 2019, MUSC set a new high, bringing in more than $284 million. For information on academic programs, visit musc.edu.

As the clinical health system of the Medical University of South Carolina, MUSC Health is dedicated to delivering the highest quality patient care available while training generations of competent, compassionate health care providers to serve the people of South Carolina and beyond. Comprising some 1,600 beds, more than 100 outreach sites, the MUSC College of Medicine, the physicians’ practice plan and nearly 275 telehealth locations, MUSC Health owns and operates eight hospitals situated in Charleston, Chester, Florence, Lancaster and Marion counties. In 2019, for the fifth consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report named MUSC Health the No. 1 hospital in South Carolina. To learn more about clinical patient services, visit muschealth.org.

MUSC and its affiliates have collective annual budgets of $3 billion. The more than 17,000 MUSC team members include world-class faculty, physicians, specialty providers and scientists who deliver groundbreaking education, research, technology and patient care.