I'm very worried about all the people who need social care in their own homes.
A care home that gets an infection can quarantine and that's bad enough, but so many older and disabled people now are reliant on carers coming into their homes several times a day to make sure their most basic needs are met.
How do you self-isolate if you have carers coming into your home? Will your carers turn up in full PPE? How distressing would that be for someone with dementia or severe LD or MH issues?
Will your carers turn up at all? What if too many care workers are off sick / self-isolating to cover everybody? What if the supervisors and managers are off sick/self isolating? What plans are there to ensure the rota doesn't turn to shit?
Home care services have been barely adequate for years now and the people who do this work are often agency workers / 0 hours contracts - exactly the people who will find it hardest financially to self isolate if they need to. Also they're nearly all women and so a massively disproportionate number have childcare responsibilities as well as responsibilities for older relatives. If the schools shut this will have a massive impact on social care.
Also, the way social care funding works now, a lot of older and disabled people are direct employers of their carers. Low paid workers absolutely need to know they can go off sick / self isolate if necessary and still have money to live, but at the same time we must be careful that any measures brought in don't send disabled people into extreme debt and destitution.
There is quite rightly pressure on the government to ensure that all workers are entitled to full sick pay from day 1. But if you employ carers directly out of your shitty little personal budget from the local authority, how on earth can you afford to pay your usual carers full sick pay as well as paying someone else to actually come and get you up, cleaned, dressed and fed? What gives?
I don't have any answers to these questions, I hope someone else does. Is there a plan?