With outbreaks at one in five aged care homes,the group representing not-for-profit residential facilities has growing concerns about enough staff getting a booster shot.
The Age that nearly 500 aged care facilities in Australia had COVID-19 exposures,placing tens of thousands of elderly residents in lockdown.
Hundreds of homes in Victoria have,since the pandemic began,locked out families and confined residents to their rooms. Many homes have had more than one outbreak. At Embracia in Reservoir,COVID-19 struck for the fourth time just before Christmas.
by the federal government showed there were active outbreaks in 495 aged care homes on Friday.
The largest active outbreak in Victoria was at operator BlueCross’s Elly Kay home in Mordialloc,where 40 residents and 12 staff tested positive. Four residents at the facility have died.
The number of aged care homes with active coronavirus cases has risen sharply. There were 54 nationally shortly before Christmas,according to a.
Since the pandemic started in Australia in March 2020, shows 924 aged care residents have died after coronavirus infection. Of those deaths,793 were in Victorian homes.
In Victoria on Sunday,the state’s COVID-19 response commander,Jeroen Weimar,said that all of Victoria’s publicly run aged care homes had received their booster shots.
Victoria operates about 200 public residential aged care homes,most in regional areas and many attached to local hospitals. Of the 615 privately run nursing homes in Victoria,189 are yet to receive booster shots,government figures show.
“All public residential aged care facilities residents were all boosted before the end of last year,” Mr Weimar said,adding that Victoria was offering its support to the Commonwealth “to make sure that all private residential aged care facilities are also boosted”.
Federal Health and Aged Care Minister Greg Hunt said on Sunday that teams delivering COVID-19 booster vaccinations had visited more than 1500 aged care homes around the country. Australia has 2650 nursing homes.
Mr Hunt said all aged care homes would have been visited by a vaccination team by the end of January. “So we are ahead of expectations and schedule,” he said.
But the federal opposition’s aged care services spokeswoman,Clare O’Neil,said the Morrison government had failed to prepare the aged care sector for the Omicron strain.
“After a royal commission,savage budget cuts,almost 1000 deaths in aged care and a completely botched initial vaccine rollout,we now have Omicron running rife through aged care and many thousands of residents not properly vaccinated,” Ms O’Neil said. “Aged care is the most dangerous setting for COVID. Even a vaguely caring and competent government would not have allowed this to happen.”
Paul Sadler,chief executive of the not-for-profit nursing homes peak body Aged and Community Services Australia,said delivering the booster program was a major logistical operation and that the feedback from his members was that “it’s largely been going well – getting to over half the aged care homes[in Australia] from[early] December to just before Christmas was a really good effort”.
“But we’ve got a wave of COVID that has now hit 20 per cent of homes at least,” he said. “And more and more aged care homes are being affected by the widespread community transmission. We now need to make sure all of the staff have access to the booster shots.”
He commended South Australia for making it mandatory for staff working in health and aged care to have had two COVID-19 vaccinations and a booster shot.
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