It will be the week of truth for the residential care centers: are they keeping the situation under control, now that the number of infections in the nursing homes is increasing at breakneck speed and the number of deaths has even tripled? “We fear sky-high mortality rates again, even if the staff are doing the impossible.”
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Virologist Steven Van Gucht (Sciensano), among others, is sounding the alarm about the rising infection rates in nursing homes.
“The figures are developing anything but favorable. The coming days will be crucial, but we hope above all that the situation of this spring will not repeat itself. The general corona figures then seemed to have become somewhat under control, after which the virus caught us by surprise and started to dramatically affect the residential care centers. ”
Van Gucht has seen the figures rise alarmingly fast for several days in a row. “In one in 3 Flemish residential care centers, at least one resident is now infected”, almost doubling from the previous week. The number of nursing homes where a major outbreak occurs is also increasing sharply, as is the number of deaths, which has tripled. According to figures from the Flemish Agency for Care and Health, 29 nursing home residents died from Covid-19 in the week of 19 to 23 October, compared to almost 90 last week.
Professor of biostatistics Geert Molenberghs (UHasselt) is also concerned. “Just to protect the retirement homes better than during the first wave, we should have gone to the lockdown much earlier, which ultimately only started on Monday. The result: today we are dealing with more than 20,000 infections per day. With such a massive spread among the general population – and we have warned about it repeatedly – it was merely a matter of time before the virus reentered nursing homes and threatened the most vulnerable there. ”
Paul Cappelier, president of the Belgian Federation of Health Care Professionals also fears tough, difficult days in the next 2 weeks: “Our federation has really been buried with alarm signals from the nursing homes in recent days. More and more infections, more and more staff who drop out, because employees either become infected or are completely burned out.
And those gaps are becoming increasingly difficult to fill: “Because at the moment, hospitals are also all hands on deck, while we received a lot of help from there during the first wave,” says the cabinet of Flemish welfare minister Wouter Beke. (CD&V).
Cappelier does not want to create panic, but at the same time he does not want to disguise the situation: “if the figures do not improve quickly, the same will happen in the nursing homes as during the spring, and we will again be confronted with peaks of up to 300 deaths per day. That is why many of our people are really furious with those responsible for policy: the lockdown should have come much faster, because otherwise hospitals and rest homes would collapse. How many times have we warned about that? ”
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