Essentia Health-St. Joseph’s Medical Center is temporarily restricting visitors due to high levels of flu-like illness.
Essentia Health is requesting visitors be limited to immediate family.
“To protect our patients and children in our community, we request children do not visit at this time,” Essentia Health stated in a news release. Flu-like symptoms include fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people with those symptoms stay home for 24 hours after their fever is gone without the use of fever-reducing medicine. Other precautions include covering your nose and mouth when coughing or sneezing and frequent washing of hands with soap and water or alcohol-based hand sanitizers.
Crow Wing County public health reported the flu vaccine this year is a good match to the influenza illness and vaccine is still available.
