Aged care facility members are more likely to die from Covid 19 if they contract it. Photo / 123RF
Aged care facility members are more likely to die from Covid 19 if they contract it. Photo / 123RF
A new Federal Government report has revealed a snapshot of Covid-19 outbreaks and revealed Victoria's devastating new statistic.
The national snapshot of Covid-19 outbreaks in Australian residential aged care facilities shows that out of a total 1967 resident cases there have been 580 deaths.
And the vast majority of these have been at facilities in Victoria, with St Basil's Home for the Aged suffering the highest single facility Covid-19 death cluster of any aged care home in Australia.
Of the home's 183 Covid-19 cases, 92 residents and 91 staff have been infected.
The chairman of St Basil's in the northern Melbourne suburb of Victoria, has stepped down, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia has revealed.
St Basil's was followed by 36 deaths at Epping Gardens Aged Care, 24 at Kalyna Care, and a further 22 Victorian aged homes had deaths in double figures ranging from 10 up to 21 people succumbing to the virus.
NSW's highest aged care cluster was 19 deaths at Newmarch House, that number including two people who "died with Covid-19 but were considered to have passed away from other cause".
Currently, 83 residential aged care facilities have active cases of Covid-19, 82 of these in Victoria and one in Queensland.
Victoria's chief health officer Brett Sutton said of the state's additional cases each day, around 30 to 35 per cent were linked to aged care.
He said it remained "difficult to get on top of transmission" within aged care, despite the lowered daily cases in the state and the increase in the use of PPE and facility specific staff training.
Six of the seven deaths reported on Sunday morning were connected to aged care.
Australia's overall Covid-19 death rate as a proportion of cases is around 3 per cent (compared to 12.8 per cent in the UK).
The death rate in aged care across Australia as a proportion of total aged care residents is around 0.32 per cent compared with 5.3 per cent in the UK where nearly 20,000 deaths have been seen.
In the UK, of the 9081 care homes included in a recent study, 56 per cent reported at least one confirmed case of coronavirus of a staff member or resident.
This compared with 7.7 per cent of all Australian aged care homes, according to the UK Office of National Statistics.
More Australians are taking their elderly relatives out of aged-care facilities as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to expose cracks in the troubled sector, data revealed last week.
Research conducted by Fifth Dimension showed 53 per cent of 1000 Australians surveyed in August had lost faith in aged-care and 54 per cent were moving to take their relatives out of nursing homes.
