Covid kills half of Sussex care home's residents over Christmas

A care home in East Sussex has been devastated by Covid, losing half of all its residents to the disease over Christmas, fuelling fears the new, more transmissible virus variant sweeping the south-east of England is beginning to breach homes’ defences.

Thirteen of 27 residents at Edendale Lodge care home in Crowhurst had died with confirmed or suspected Covid since 13 December, said the home operator’s managing director, Adam Hutchison, who also runs care homes in Kent.

More than a third of the staff also tested positive during the outbreak in which residents died on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day. The latest death came on Monday this week.

“It was an awful Christmas and terrible for the staff,” Hutchison said. “It is just unstoppable. We are sitting ducks.”

Across England, Covid outbreaks in care homes are rising again, after months of far lower infection rates than in the spring as a result of control measures.

On Tuesday, Essex county council banned all visits to care homes in its area, citing “the growing number of outbreaks in care homes and the difficulty in controlling these outbreaks”. The Kent Integrated Care Alliance, which represents care homes in its area, is also warning of deaths and care worker absences, emotional and mental exhaustion among care workers and a threat to the viability of care homes themselves.

Many care homes are frustrated that vaccines are yet to be deployed to residents. Boris Johnson told parliament on Wednesday he wanted the programme to be accelerated and that 10% of care home residents and 14% of care home staff had so far received the vaccine.

“That clearly needs to be stepped up,” the PM said.

GPs were due to start taking the AstraZeneca vaccine to care homes from the second half of this week.

Hutchison said several of the deceased residents in the home had been considered to be close to the end of their lives, but the virus took them months before they were likely to have died. Others were fitter.

“One of our residents played the piano and I would speak to him when I went in,” he said .

The outbreak was detected by routine swab testing. None of the 14 residents who tested positive had any symptoms when the results came back, Hutchison said. One of the 12 staff who tested positive was admitted to hospital but was recovering.

WATCH: What does it take to vaccinate 13 million people in six weeks?

The outbreak appears to have confounded the home’s infection control measures, including a ban on visits, apart from at windows, personal protective equipment for carers and no use of agency staff who operate between different homes and might spread the virus.

“It’s hard for me to say how it got in,” said Hutchison. “Because of the protocols we were following, everything was there.”

He said some residents had attended hospital appointments and that staff necessarily had lives outside of work. His company, Belmont Healthcare, operates four care homes and asks staff to declare if they have second jobs.

Care home deaths across England rose steadily during December and at a slightly faster rate than deaths overall from Covid, official figures show. At the beginning of December, care homes in England recorded 440 people who died from Covid in a week, rising to 588 by the week before Christmas, according to the Office for National Statistics. While the figures are far higher than in the last week of September, when only 42 people died from Covid, they remain a fraction of the up to 2,700 care home residents registered as dying weekly from Covid at the pandemic’s first peak in April, when there was also less testing to identify cases.

HC-One, the largest private operator of care homes in the UK, said on Tuesday that a third of its 330 care homes were facing outbreaks, but mostly with limited numbers of people infected and more staff than residents testing positive. It has fewer homes in the south-east than in the north and its outbreak rates have fallen over the last month.

Across the UK, visits have been largely prohibited in care homes unless residents are close to the end of their lives or infection control screens or cubicles have been set up. Homes have also been provided with free PPE by the government and a network of care homes specialising in accepting Covid-positive discharges from hospitals to try and avoid seeding the virus among the most vulnerable has been set up. In the current lockdown, close-contact indoor visits are not allowed, with window or cubicle visits also banned during outbreaks.

Hutchison said that as well as the human cost, he was concerned care homes affected by new outbreaks “will simply have to close down”.

“What happens to those already in unviable care homes?” he said. “Where will those individuals go? More often than not into an NHS setting, putting further stress on that health service.”

WATCH: Will vaccines provide the way out of lockdown?