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How do you completely lock down a care home? It's a labor-intensive industry and you can't just put care on hold for a few weeks like you could with an assembly
by usrusr 6y ago
How do you completely lock down a care home? It's a labor-intensive industry and you can't just put care on hold for a few weeks like you could with an assembly line. The only way to keep a virus like this away from care homes is to keep it away from friends and families of caretakers and from their friends and families. You can't focus prevention when you are dealing with presymptomatic spread.
- frereubu 6y agoBan visits, quarantine any goods coming into the building for three days, strict hygiene requirements for staff entering and existing the building. It would be really difficult, but when the other alternative is letting a highly contagious virus spread rapidly through a susceptible population I'd say that's worth it. As others have pointed out in this thread, strict lockdowns haven't prevented a horrifying number of deaths in care homes.
- atourgates 6y agoI don't think it was really possible in the early stages of the pandemic, and might not be possible now. Care workers have to go in and out of elderly care facilities. We still don't have much data on how good COVID-19 testing at tracking pre-symptomatic cases, but the data points at "certainly not 100% accurate". Even if you tested _every_ care worker before they entered the building, you'd likely miss some asymptomatic cases who could go on to transmit to the elderly. Nevermind the fact that earlier in the pandemic, the kinds of near-instant tests we have now (allbet with unimpressive reliability) weren't available.
- frereubu 6y agoSure, it's not going to be perfect. But at the other end of the scale in the UK, for example, they were discharging people they knew to be infected into care homes. If you tested everyone you would miss some, but you'd catch some. You'd provide proper PPE to everyone (that is, if you hadn't cancelled pandemic preparedness measures as in the US and UK) and so on. The risk wouldn't be eliminated, but you could at least reduce it with some relatively simple measures.
- vondur 6y agoI believe there was one place in France where the care workers moved into the facilities and then the movement of people and items into it were strictly controlled. I believe no one died from Covid-19 at the facility.
- dvdplm 6y agoThis is exactly what needed to be done, in Sweden and elsewhere. Pay staff triple and have them stay with the old folks and get everything delivered by externals with as little contact as possible. And no new admissions into the care homes.
- bbarnett 6y agoWill you force them with a gun? To forgo all friends, family, comforts of home, and be literally trapped at work for months? Money doesn't just buy people. You'd essentially be drafting them.
- Afforess 6y agoYes, then draft them. I'm in favour of martial law for this crisis.
- aaaxyz 6y ago>You'd essentially be drafting them. In every country (except maybe Iceland which doesn't have a standing army), the military has plenty of medically trained soldiers who are used to doing these things away from home for months