The head of Social Care Policy at Hong Kong University has explained how the country was able to limit its confirmed cases of COVID-19 to just 1,056 and just four deaths – none in its aged care homes.
Speaking to the UK Parliament’s health and social care select committee via video link, Professor Terry Lum said that the country treated the outbreak like SARS, the killer virus that hit Asia in 2003 with aged care homes quarantining any confirmed cases in hospital for up to three months.
“Most important is stopping the transmission from hospital to nursing home,” he said. “We do a very good job on isolation. Once we have any person infected, we isolate them in hospital for three months and at the same time we isolate all the close contact people in a separate quarantine centre for 14 days for observation."
“They do tests regularly in that 14 days to make sure they don’t have the virus. We use a supercomputer to trace the close contacts of people being infected particularly for cluster outbreaks.”
Professor Lum added that all aged care homes had a trained infection controller and carry out emergency drills simulating an infectious outbreak four times a year so infection control becomes “a well-worn practice”.
Singapore and South Korea – which have also recorded zero deaths in aged care homes – also followed similar policies of quarantining infected residents or moving them to hospitals.
“[Their] infection control policies [were] based not on influenza but on SARS and that has helped them,” Adelina Comas-Herrera, a research fellow at the London School of Economics studying COVID-19 deaths in care homes globally, told the same committee.
