Nursing homes: rapid tests needed for visitors – Coronavirus Vienna

Nursing homes and retirement homes are hot spots of the crown crisis with particularly high death toll. However, they are “always a mirror of the general situation regarding infections,” Maria Katharina Moser, director of Diakonie, said in ORF’s Ö1 morning newspaper. Further testing would be helpful, for example visiting relatives, but many institutions need outside help here.

The tests for visitors “are also provided for by the regulations. The question is always whether the funds are available,” he emphasized: “Our staff is extremely busy.” Covid has already increased the healthcare effort. “External teams should be available,” says the director of the evangelical aid organization. Because employees should be “urgently relieved” in this regard. Ongoing massive tests show that this can also be arranged differently.

Furthermore, the issue of evidence is not just about family members and other visitors arriving at residences. Because the residents themselves “can leave the nursing home under the same rules and conditions as all of us,” and of course, an infection could also occur outside the facility. “That means we also have to look at external contacts,” Moser said, asking family members to get tested beforehand.

In those federal states and in regions and places with a high total number of corona cases, nursing homes are also hit the hardest, Moser says: Of course, specific measures are needed, but the best protection is “low numbers in general”. “When it comes to nursing homes and nursing homes, the issue of isolation measures, visit restrictions, exit restrictions, and we really have to see very carefully that isolation protects, but at the same time also harms, and we proceed in a very different way “. emphasized the director of Diakonie.