Nursing home residents make up more than half of Ireland’s Covid-19 toll

Dr Tony Holohan said it was a high rate of infection compared to the wider community.

More than half the victims of Covid-19 in Ireland were nursing home residents, the chief medical officer has said.

Of the 288 people who have died so far in the outbreak, 156 had been living in nursing homes prior to their deaths (54%), Dr Tony Holohan said.

Most of those deaths occurred in hospital settings.

Dr Holohan said the clusters had been detected in 207 residential settings across Ireland, 135 of which were nursing homes.

There are approximately 550 nursing homes across Ireland.

Dr Holohan said in the affected nursing homes, one in five staff members had reported Covid-19 symptoms, and one in six residents.

“That’s quite a high rate of infection in relative terms compared to the community at large,” he said.

“It just underscores the point that we’ve been making all along – that we are concerned about the rate of infection (in nursing homes).

“But, as our data shows us, there’s still quite a large number of nursing homes without any reported clusters at this point in time and that would be a continuing focus of ours to try to prevent infection spreading into those nursing homes and to mitigate the impact of the infection in the nursing homes that currently report it.”

Dr Holohan said the pattern of high infection rates in nursing homes had been witnessed in every country across Europe.