Holohan defends State handling of Covid-19 crisis in nursing homes

Additional reporting: Aoife Moore

The country's Chief Medical Officer insists the state acted 'significantly' and 'quickly' to tackle the spread of Covid-19 in nursing homes.

Speaking this evening, Dr Tony Holohan, of the National Public Health Emergency Team, says tackling community transmission was key to protecting older people in these facilities:

"I think the response of the State has been significant, a very early response in comparison to other countries, of a public-health-led response, which, in the first case, had to deal with community transmission of this virus.

"There is simply no way of protecting nursing homes, or any institutional setting, if we don't control the spread of this infection in the community in general."

The defence comes as Nursing Homes Ireland (NHI) and the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) today both sharply criticised the HSE's handling of the virus in nursing homes, with a special Dáil committee on the State finding that nursing homes were not discussed until the 12th meeting of the NPHET, regarding dealing with the outbreak.

Ireland has 580 nursing homes with 31,000 residents. Of these, 114 homes are statutory: there are 5,708 people in HSE-funded centres. And of Ireland’s 1,606 deaths, 878 occurred in nursing homes (54.5%).