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Ban visits, quarantine any goods coming into the building for three days, strict hygiene requirements for staff entering and existing the building. It would be
by frereubu 6y ago
Ban 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.