Hundreds of nursing home staff are isolating and unable to work as care homes are challenged by a growing number of Covid-19 outbreaks, the HSE has said.
The HSE’s chief operations officer Anne O’Connor said the situation was “deteriorating” with over 100 outbreaks currently open or active in the Republic.
She added that nursing homes were “very challenged” in terms of staffing.
“We’ve 101 [outbreaks] open in all nursing homes and of the 80 of most concern, we have 880 staff off work. That’s across the private and public nursing homes,” she said.
“That’s a very significant number of staff who are unavailable to work and that’s of very significant concern to us.”
Ms O’Connor said the outbreaks and staffing shortages were all interlinked with soaring rates of Covid-19 infection in the community, with the situation most exacerbated in areas with high rates of community transmission.
Category red
She added that Covid-19 response teams were working closely with residential care settings.
“In our residential care sector it’s the rate of growth and the rate of increase in outbreaks that is of concern to us,” she said.
Ms O’Connor said there had been a “very significant increase” in the number of outbreaks being recorded in residential care facilities in the past three days.
In the last week, the number of nursing homes experiencing a high-risk “category red” outbreak of the virus had increased from five to 15.
Yesterday alone, 30 new outbreaks were recorded in long-term residential care homes and another four in hospitals.
“Of the 177 outbreaks in long-term residential care, we know 101 of those relate to nursing homes. That number has grown very significantly,” Ms O’Connor added.
“We’re still not back to where we were in the previous surge, however we can see the position is deteriorating.”
