relatives

Care homes in England to name relatives as key workers to allow visits

Relatives of care home residents in England are to be designated as key workers so they can be tested regularly for Covid-19 and continue to visit loved ones.



Photograph: Robin Weaver/Alamy

© Provided by The Guardian
Photograph: Robin Weaver/Alamy

The plans, initially a pilot project, with no details about how they would be rolled out, were announced to MPs on Tuesday by the care minister, Helen Whately. They are a win for families and charities that have been calling for months for relatives to be given the same key worker status as staff.

Along with testing, the single designated relative would be trained in the use of PPE, she said, although she was unable to give a date for when the pilot would begin.

Organisations including Dementia UK and the Alzheimer’s Society have been calling for such a move, arguing in a letter to the government in July that the care given by family members was essential to dementia patients’ wellbeing. Social distancing restrictions had contributed to a “hidden catastrophe” in care homes, which had been closed to non-essential visitors since March, they said.

Whately has been challenged at the science and technology committee and health and social care committee over mistakes and mishandling that led to a huge Covid-19 death toll in care homes this year.

Jeremy Hunt, the former Conservative health minister who chaired the sitting, put it to her that care homes should have been banned from taking transfers from hospitals where tests were unavailable, or if it had not been possible to quarantine the person, as was the case in Germany.

“I know it’s very easy to say things with hindsight, but looking back we should have done that here, shouldn’t we?” he asked.

She replied that this would not happen now, and that the Department for Health had

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Opinion | We should be just as careful about covid-19 in relatives’ homes as we are in grocery stores

As the fall school term approached, universities thought that they could effectively implement similar protocols on campus. They instituted safeguards including reduced class size, improved classroom ventilation and daily symptom checks. The problem? Students got infected when they engaged in risky behaviors off-campus. At the University of New Hampshire, 11 cases were traced to a fraternity party hosting about 100 guests without masks. Medical degrees apparently provide no guarantee of safe gathering: A single party resulted in covid-19 infections in 18 anesthesiology residents and fellows training at the University of Florida.

At K-12 institutions, the hard work administrators and teachers are doing to enforce mask-wearing and physical distancing will be undone if kids gather after school without similar protections. The risk extends to parents, and increases as families come together with friends and relatives with whom they are likely to let down their guard.

I spoke this week with several public health officials from different parts of the country who noted this same trend. “In the beginning, we focused our efforts on homeless shelters, jails and workplaces that the city has the ability to regulate and enforce,” said Allison Arwady, the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health. “But over the last few months, only 5 to 6 percent of our cases are being linked to these congregate settings.” She identified the current primary source of spread as informal social gatherings: barbecues, retirement parties and birth celebrations.

Nilesh Kalyanaraman, health officer for Anne Arundel County in Maryland, agrees. He said to me that when his team looks at the data, “We see that family gatherings are coming up as one of the biggest sources of spread.”

Why? “There’s a lot of magical thinking when it comes to covid,” Arwady said. “It’s natural to feel safe among those you know

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