'Stranger in a hazmat suit': families of Dorothy Henderson Lodge residents try to stay positive

After one month of being confined to their rooms, some residents of a Sydney aged care home at the centre of a coronavirus outbreak have been allowed to take a short walk outside.

They went one at a time, escorted by an aged care worker. Among them was 68-year-old Christine Fennell, who has been living at the Dorothy Henderson Lodge since last year.

She was allowed to take two short supervised walks. It is the most exercise she has had in 30 days, since the first case of coronavirus was detected at the Macquarie Park facility. Since then five of the home’s elderly residents have died after testing positive to Covid-19, and 17 other people – 12 residents and five staff – have also tested positive.

Fennell, who has a persistent cough from a lingering chest infection, was tested for the virus on Friday 13 March, although her son, Thomas Wright, has not yet received the result. He assumed no news was good news until he received a letter from the BaptistCare general manager of residential services, Allan Waters, on 3 April, saying the centre had “experienced new cases of residents testing positive to Covid-19 after previously testing negative”.

Waters wrote that it was a “concerning situation”. He said the home had been inspected by an infection control specialist that day, who recommended a change when staff wear hospital gowns as part of their personal protective equipment. He also said that 65% of the centre’s regular staff, who had been in self-isolation, were now back at work.

The death of the fifth resident, a 95-year-old woman, was reported on Wednesday. Ross Low, the chief executive of BaptistCare, which runs the facility, said the loss was “incredibly difficult, especially knowing just how hard everyone is working to care for our residents and staff”.

The same message was sent via text message to family members.

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BaptistCare declined to answer further questions or participate in an interview with Guardian Australia.

The residents themselves are told very little.

“When I am calling mum, she does not know these things,” Wright says. “She is hearing this from me. The outside world in her head is still where it was a month ago. She was quite surprised to hear that Sydney is in lockdown.”

The first message of the outbreak came on the afternoon of 4 March. It began: “Dear residents and families of BaptistCare, we are writing to inform that a staff member at Dorothy Henderson Lodge in Macquarie Park, has been confirmed to have the coronavirus.”

The employee was a 50-year-old woman, an aged care worker, who had tested positive the day before. The source of her infection has still not been determined. It was the first case of untraced community transmission in Australia.

The message continued that “any staff or residents identified as being at risk are isolated”.

That evening Wright says his mother was told not to come to the dining hall for dinner.

The next day, 5 March, health authorities in New South Wales confirmed that a 95-year-old woman, who was a resident of the home and had died in hospital on Tuesday night, before the first infection at the home was announced, had also tested positive to Covid-19. The virus had spread – an 82-year-old man and a 70-year-old man had also tested positive.

All other residents were confined to their rooms, although Guardian Australia understands that order was not strictly adhered to for several days.

A number of the regular staff at the centre did not turn up to work, fearing infection. Apart from close contacts, staff were not immediately told to self-isolate. Some did not receive that order until two days later.

Fennell, confined to her small self-contained room, did not receive lunch until 4pm that day when it arrived on a tray carried “by a stranger in a hazmat suit”, Wright says. Her room is next to a kitchen, where she could ordinarily prepare food outside of meal times. But since the outbreak, she has been confined to her room without even the ability to make herself a cup of tea.

By Sunday 8 March, an 82-year-old man died, bringing Australia’s death toll from the coronavirus to three. As of Saturday it sat at 30.

Dorothy Henderson Lodge is managed in wings or pods, with limited staff movement between wings to limit the spread of ordinary infectious diseases that can spread through an aged care home, like influenza or gastroenteritis. When the virus was first detected centre management locked down the problem wing and isolated staff identified as close contacts of the infected staff member and residents.

But the 70-year-old man lived in a different pod to the first reported cases. When he tested positive, it showed the virus had spread despite these efforts to contain it.

A spokeswoman from NSW Health says staff from the department visited the lodge on 3 March and “initiated isolation of residents and enhanced infection control precautions among staff”.

“There is no evidence that the time taken to identify and notify staff who were close contacts resulted in further transmission of the disease,” the spokeswoman says.

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The response was perhaps not as swift as it would be if a similar outbreak were reported today. But it was the first week of March: a lifetime ago in Australia’s response to the coronavirus. Overseas travel was still allowed and returning travellers were not told to isolate, only monitor themselves for respiratory symptoms. The magnitude of the crisis had not yet sunk in.

“I do think that they [BaptistCare] were taken, and the sector has been taken, a bit by surprise,” says Ian Yates, the chief executive of Council on the Ageing Australia. “And to some degree they have swung too much the other way. In some places there are no cases at all but they have gone into complete lockdown and not let family visit at all.”

BaptistCare announced it was banning all visitors to all of its homes on 18 March, the same day the federal government said visits to people in aged care homes would be limited to one per day with a maximum of two people. Other nursing homes followed suit in increasing the government’s recommendation to a voluntary visitor ban.

There are already reports, says Yates, of people in aged care homes across the country “declining” due to being deprived regular visits or confined to their rooms, with reports of increased mental health concerns and de-cognition.”

“Older people decondition really quickly,” Yates says.

Wright says his mother has put a brave face on her isolation – she has learned how to use video conferencing app Zoom and is speaking to him daily.

“She has a big pile of DVDs there,” he says. “I am not sure that she has made her way through all of them.”

Gerard Hayes, the secretary of the NSW branch of the Health Services Union, says the aged care sector has acted “much faster to act than the federal government” to shut down homes and protect residents.

“The fact we have seen just four aged care facilities in NSW with confirmed cases clearly demonstrates that aged care workers are doing an incredible job at keeping vulnerable residents safe,” Hayes says.