Multi-bed care-home rooms doubled virus risk: study
Trump touts manufacturing on trip to Wisconsin
A new study points to a disturbingly simple explanation for some of the havoc wrought by COVID-19 in Canada’s nursing homes: keeping residents in ward-like shared accommodation can be lethal.
The deaths of close to 300 long-term care residents in just one province could have been prevented if those individuals were housed in twobed instead of four-bed rooms, suggests the research.
The study by University of Toronto, McMaster University and Public Health Ontario scientists, found a clear association between the degree of crowding in homes — how many people share a room and toilet — and the virus’s spread.
Residents of the most tightly packed facilities were twice as likely to get infected and to die as those in the least-crowded homes, concluded their paper.
“Too often, the building and the physical infrastructure gets forgotten in this conversation,” said Dr. Nathan Stall, a geriatrician at Toronto’s Mt. Sinai hospital and one of the authors. “(But) public health experts … would know on face value that that’s sort of infection-prevention 101: crowded rooms are bad.”
He noted Ontario standards introduced in 1999 said new facilities could have no more than two people per room. Older homes, most of them for-profit, were encouraged to retrofit but few have done so, said Stall.
COVID-19’s disastrous toll on nursing homes has been the central story of the pandemic in Canada, accounting for about 80 per cent of the country’s 8,500 deaths.
A new report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information underscores that fact. Canada’s per-capita number of long-term-care deaths has been about average among similar industrialized countries, the institute found. But as a percentage of a nation’s total COVID-19 mortality, Canada’s deaths far exceed those of other Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development members, the institute found. Deaths in long-term-care in OECD countries averaged 42 per cent, and ranged from less than 10 per cent in Slovenia and Hungary, to 66 per cent in Spain.
The industry agrees such setups are one of the root causes of the devastating outbreaks, said Donna Duncan, CEO of the Ontario Long Term Care Association. But moving away from four-bed accommodation will have a major impact, she said.
Though the association says only about 10 per cent of residents, not 25, live in those rooms, converting them to two beds now would take 4,300 places out of the system, adding to a waiting list for nursing home places that already stands at 36,000, said Duncan.
“We saw the numbers … then shared that information with government and said, ‘We have a very large problem here,’ ” she said. “We need to prepare today to look at alternate accommodations and solutions. … We have to move very quickly.”
The study, by Stall and colleagues, published on an academic “preprint” site without having undergone peer review, ranked facilities based on the density of housing, ranging from those with mostly single rooms to homes with only four-person rooms.
That data was then correlated with COVID-19 infections and deaths.
The type of accommodation didn’t affect whether a facility had an outbreak. But the spread of the virus was higher in crowded homes — 9.7 per cent infected versus 4.5 per cent in the least crowded — while deaths were 2.7 per cent and 1.3 per cent respectively.
MARINETTE — President Donald Trump, trailing in national opinion polls ahead of the November election, visited a shipbuilding facility in Wisconsin Thursday to tout his record on manufacturing and shore up support in the politically crucial state.
Trump went to Fincantieri Marinette Marine, a naval construction company in Marinette, after making an initial stop in Green Bay to take part in a town hall meeting with Fox News.
The U.S. Navy in April awarded Italy’s Fincantieri a $5.5-billion US contract to build its newest class of frigates, something Trump lauded in a post on Twitter as he arrived in the Midwestern state.
Trump is well behind former vice-president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in polls in Wisconsin, a state Trump won narrowly in 2016.
The Republican president has come under pressure for his responses to the pandemic and to civil rights protests across the country.
Advisers want him to focus on his economic record.
At the shipyard, he said the future of the facility had looked bleak not long ago but “then a lot of good things came along.”
“Manufacturing, remember, manufacturing was never going to come back. Well it did come back. It came back big,” Trump said.
Biden, who travelled to Pennsylvania Thursday, said Trump didn’t deserve credit for the success of the area he was visiting.
“Today, Donald Trump is in Marinette to take credit for Obama-Biden administration-fuelled successes in an attempt to paper over the fact that Wisconsin has been bleeding blue-collar manufacturing jobs over the past few weeks,” he said in a statement. “Instead of offering real relief to working families, he’s trying to claim credit for progress in Marinette he did not build.”