ALTAMONTE SPRINGS, Fla. — A Seminole County business that provides life-saving physical rehab to its clients is now opening up again.
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NextStep Orlando in Altamonte Springs was closed for more than a month and a half despite the fact it offers essential services people who have paralysis due to spinal cord and brain injuries.
Charter Communications has temporarily opened its live stream free to the public. You can watch Spectrum News via our live stream on your desktop or laptop without a subscription by visiting our website and clicking “Watch Live” in the upper right. Charter also is temporarily offering free broadband and wifi access for 60 days to teachers and families with K-12 or college students. To enroll, call 1-844-488-8395. The company also will open more than half a million wifi hotspots across the country.
But owner Liza Riedel says because of those conditions, many of her clients are also especially vulnerable to COVID-19 and some of them cannot even physically cough because of their paralysis.
So she says she had to make the very tough decision to close down when the pandemic started, because she simply could not risk any of her clients getting the coronavirus.
But she knew that measure to save their lives was also putting their health at risk.
“They need cardio, they need the interaction,” said Riedel. “Their spasms start acting up and they need to come here and get out of that wheelchair. The body’s not meant to sit in a wheelchair all day long, so they need to put their body in movement. And they were asking on a daily basis for us to open back up.”
While closed, Riedel’s nonprofit business took a huge financial hit. She was able to get one of those PPP loans only after the federal government approved that second round of funding.
But she says because the PPP loan requires a business owner to use 75 percent of the federal funds for payroll within eight weeks, once she was approved for a loan she had to go ahead and hire back her entire staff and open right back up even with those safety concerns for her clients.
To keep her clients safe, Riedel is only seeing clients one at a time. Her trainers will get temperature checked, wear gloves and masks and there will be constant cleaning and hand-washing to keep her facility clean.
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