A lack of vaccination data on residential aged care is making it difficult for RMIT researchers to assess if delays in the vaccine rollout in residential aged care led to higher death rates in aged homes at the height of the pandemic.
Data for the period 8 August 8 2021 to 9 July 2022, which includes the beginning of the Omicron outbreak that began in January 2022, clearly shows that aged care residents had higher rates of death than the general 70-plus population.
"For the majority of the data period, aged care residents in NSW and Victoria (purple and black curves respectively) had higher death rates than the general NSW population aged 70 and over with 2 doses (orange). MUCH higher even," said Professor Lewi Stone, Professor of Biomathematics at RMIT University, who has an interest in modeling the spread of diseases.
But Professor Stone told The SOURCE, "We don’t know much about the aged care residents vaccination status [for the period]. They may be vaccinated or not in this dataset."
As of 28 January 2022 "there were larger proportions of unvaccinated in the aged care populations (7% in NSW and 9% in Victoria) compared to the unvaccinated general 70+ population (1.4%).
"These statistics... suggest that the [vaccine ] coverage may have impacted the deaths in RACFs," Professor Stone said.
However, he said, "We unfortunately do not have data on the vaccine rollout in RACFs and so we cannot compare the speed of the rollout between the RACF population and the general population."
The vaccination campaign began on 22 February 2021, and was criticised for being rolled out too late. Vaccinations in residential aged care were also criticised as being too slow.
You can read the research here.
