Don’t take this the wrong way not goady genuine question can health workers tell us how exactly does the infection spread?
I want to be more informed about what’s genuinely going wrong in those different settings from the horses mouth?
The infection is spread by droplets.
Health and social care by definition involves close proximity between people, so there is exposure to the virus if either the carer or the patient/resident is incubating or asymptomatically infected.
Complete abandonment of the track, trace and isolate programme means we have no idea who is infected and who isn’t.
Exposure can be minimised by the non-infected person wearing PPE and the infected person wearing a mask.
Ideally hospital and care settings would assume that everyone needs to be protected from everyone else (social distancing makes this assumption, but is unimplementable in a care setting) but this hasn’t happened fully
b) PPE is difficult to wear and doff 100% safely, even for people who are used to It
c) the PPE guidance in this country falls short of the WHO guidance
d) there simply isn’t enough PPE
Also hospitals receive new Covid-19 patients all the time; until recently it was the same for care homes who were forced to accept infected or potentially infected residents back from the hospital setting. This too increases the risk of exposure.
So all in all it’s a mess. The only way to get out of it is to know where the virus is, and the only way to do that is test, trace and isolate. But we’re way behind on that.