After last week’s lessons from the UK frontline, this week the COVID-19 situation in the UK’s aged care homes has continued to deteriorate.
HC-One – which has around 350 homes – has revealed that as of 8pm on Monday, there had been 311 deaths from confirmed or suspected COVID-19, with outbreaks in two-thirds of its homes, The Guardian reports.
MHA – a Not For Profit with 131 homes – said it had had 210 deaths across it homes, with outbreaks in around half.
The UK has around 11,300 aged care homes with around 410,000 residents run by 5,500 different providers.
The Department of Health and Social Care has confirmed 2,099 care homes in England have so far had cases of the virus – but there are no firm figures on the number of deaths.
HC-One and MHA run about 3% of the UK’s aged care homes, but their combined death toll is higher than the 237 aged care home deaths in England and Wales reported by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Tuesday – suggesting that the Government’s figures are either wrong or there has been a big jump in aged care home deaths.
The former is possible. Currently the UK Government only publishes COVID-19 deaths where the person has died in hospital. The ONS is also only collecting care home figures from death certificates where doctors report that a fatality was confirmed or suspected of having occurred because of the virus.
England’s aged care regulator, the Care Quality Commission, has said it will begin recording deaths in homes from this week by asking care providers to give daily updates on the number of confirmed and suspected cases.
The Government also announced it would expand testing in aged care homes on Tuesday night in response to criticism of its handling of the pandemic in aged care homes.
Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, says that everyone in a care setting who is symptomatic will now get a test in future and patients discharged from hospital to aged care homes will be routinely tested.
Previously, only the first five symptomatic patients in a care home were tested and – as Tom Lyons and Brett Burton from the UK’s Black Swan Care Group explained in last week’s video conference – hospitals have been discharging patients into aged care homes without testing.
“I am deeply conscious that people in residential care are among the most vulnerable to coronavirus,” Mr Hancock said. “We are doing everything we can to keep workers, residents and their families safe, and I am determined to ensure that everyone who needs a coronavirus test should be able to have access to one.”
Is it a case of ‘too little, too late’ however?