Sweden
Sweden’s health authorities are blaming the country’s death toll – which is higher than in neighbouring Denmark, Norway and Finland – on the fatality rate in care homes.
About 90% of the 3,700 people who have died from coronavirus in Sweden were over 70, and half were living in care homes, according to a study from Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare at the end of April.
“We failed to protect our elderly. That’s really serious, and a failure for society as a whole,” health minister Lena Hallengren told Swedish Television.
Belgium
More than half of the country’s coronavirus victims have died in care homes. Care home workers say the sector was initially overlooked, and they suffered from shortages of masks and skyrocketing prices for hand sanitiser.
“Belgian society has decided that the lives of these confined elderly counted much less than those of the so-called ‘actives’,” social scientist Geoffrey Pleyers wrote in Le Soir last month.
More than three-quarters of deaths in care homes (77%) are suspected cases, leading to complaints that Belgium is over-counting coronavirus deaths. Belgium’s crisis centre, which collates the data, counters that its approach is more transparent.
Spain
The country was shocked at the end of March when the defence minister revealed that soldiers drafted in to disinfect residential homes had found some elderly people abandoned and dead in their beds.
The central government has asked the country’s 17 regional governments to send in their figures on care home deaths, but has yet to publish them. However, the regional governments of Madrid and Catalonia have been publishing their own figures on people who have died in care homes from the virus, or while exhibiting symptoms consistent with it.
In Madrid, the total for Covid, or suspected Covid, deaths since 8 March stood at 5,886 on Thursday. In Catalonia, it was 3,375. Between them, care home deaths in the two regions account for more than a third of all the coronavirus deaths in the country.
Italy
Deaths from coronavirus in Italy’s care homes came to light only when newspapers started to report on the issue in early April.
The prime focus was on a care home in Milan, which had more than 1,000 residents and where there was an unusual increase in deaths in March. An investigation began, and care home officials found that 300 residents had died between January and April.
Of the 900 residents still in the home, 34% were positive for Covid-19. Italy’s higher health institute found that between 1 February and 17 April there had been 6,773 deaths across all care homes, 40% of which were due to Covid-19.
United States
One of the first US coronavirus cases was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control in Washington state in late January. By late March, the US outbreak was centred around one care home, the Life Care Centre of Kirkland in King County, where more than three-quarters of residents fell ill and 40 people died. Staff who worked multiple jobs unwittingly carried the virus to other care homes in the area.
For a variety of reasons – including the US’s privatised healthcare system, pre-existing problems with infection-control in America’s care homes, a lack of federal leadership on the pandemic and the varying rate of spread of the virus across other states – lessons from King County have not been learned.
Residents of nursing homes have accounted for a staggering proportion of Covid-19 deaths in the US, where more than 85,000 people have died. Privately compiled data shows that such deaths now account for more than half of all fatalities in 14 states, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. But only 33 states report nursing home-related deaths, so the true extent of the problem across the state remains unknown.