Care homes report infections at alarming rate
What is often overlooked when tallying deaths from COVID-19 by country is that very few national figures include suspected virus fatalities in care homes. As we show here, as many of two-thirds of some regions’ care homes have reported infections.
Due to a mixture of poor planning, stretched resources and hospital patients being prioritised, care homes have been often overlooked during the outbreak of COVID-19. In closed quarters, the virus is wiping out entire facilities, showing bans on visits may have come too little, too late.
Some 30% of care homes in Stockholm and 20% in Paris have reported infections, while in France’s eastern region Grand East the figure is an astonishing two-thirds. But take all the figures with a pinch of salt – it’s much harder to track infections in thousands of fragmented care homes than under dozens or hundreds of hospitals run by a central body.
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