The U.S. is not the only country with a lot of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes (they are called care homes in many other countries). And yet some countries do not have this problem at all. Why is that?
It turns out that those that modeled their response on SARS did well, those that modeled their response on the flu did not.
The thing is, influenza isn’t that infectious. It’s R-nought isn’t much more than one. For SARS-CoV-2, it’s more like three (without social distancing).
This actually should seem like common sense. Now, isolate you’re thinking to the full-blown flu. Not oh-I-had-a-24-hour-flu thinking, but rather the full-blown, real, I-felt-like-I-wanted-to-die-for-9-days flu. What would have happened in your family when you were a kid if that infection was particularly contagious? Can you imagine all of you getting it within a few days of the first person, and every single person being out of commission for an overlapping period of almost a week? Truth is … that happened to almost no one because the flu isn’t that infectious. SARS-CoV-2 is.
So, in the U.S., the U.K. and some other countries, the it’s-just-like-the-flu policy was to make patients who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 go back to the nursing/care home, where they infected … everyone … and lots of people died. In contrast, places like Hong Kong quarantined anyone who tested positive, and monitored for 14 days anyone who’d come into contact with them.
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