COVID-19 and Long-Term Care Policy for Older People in Hong Kong

Abstract

is a major international travel hub and a densely populated city geographically adjacent to Mainland China. Despite these risk factors, it has managed to contain the COVID-19 epidemic without a total lockdown of the city. Three months on since the outbreak, the city reported slightly more than 1,000 infected people, only four deaths and no infection in residential care homes or adult day care centers. Public health intervention and population behavioral change were credited as reasons for this success. Hong Kong's public health intervention was developed from the lessons learned during the SARS epidemic in 2003 that killed 299 people, including 57 residential care residents. This perspective summarizes Hong Kong's responses to the COVID-19 virus, with a specific focus on how the long-term care system contained the spread of COVID-19 into residential care homes and home and community-based services.

August 2020 Interim EuGMS guidance to prepare European Long-Term Care Facilities for COVID-19

“…Because LTCF staff members need more support and recognition than ever, considerations for nursing home leaders and regulators to support the health and well-being of nursing home staff and residents have been proposed. These include (1) measures to keep staff informed (because expert advice evolves) and (2) health measures (focussing on stress management and meeting the basic needs of staff) [ 54 ], by (a) optimizing human resources (redeploying and educating staff from other health care facilities (such as hospitals) to work in nursing homes), (b) implementing new clinical practices related to COVID-19, especially end-of-life care including advanced care planning, symptom relief, and post mortem care, (c) providing education and training, and (d) acquiring PPE [ 56 ]. In Hong Kong, for example, all health care institutions keep PPE in stock (exchanged every 3 months) [ 56 ].…”

Could we have done better with COVID-19 in nursing homes?

“…All health care institutions kept PPE in stock (exchanged every 3 months). Policies learned from SARS, such as social distancing, rigorous hygiene practice, or using masks, were swiftly adopted by the health care staff and all citizens [9]. That was not the case in Europe, where many LTC facilities were poorly equipped, and staff was not trained on how to protect themselves and the residents.…”

Risk Reduction of COVID-19 Pandemic in Pakistan

“…Recent year has been observed as a massive level COVID-19 outbreak in all over the world (Freedman, 2020;Leong et al, 2020;Lum, Shi, Wong, & Wong, 2020;Sadhu et al, 2020). It affects most of the countries adversely such as China (Jianhua, 2020;Li et al, 2020), United States, Italy (Stefanini, Azzolini, & Condorelli, 2020), United Kingdom (Freedman, 2020), Spain and France (WHO, 2020a), Australia (Shakespeare-Finch et al, 2020), Turkey (Haktanir, Seki, & Dilmaç, 2020), Hong Kong (Hartley & Jarvis, 2020), Africa (Ezenwa et al, 2020), and Pakistan (Khan et al, 2020;Noreen et al, 2020) including other countries (WHO, 2020a(WHO, , 2020b(WHO, , 2020c.…”

“…These countries also adopted multiple measures to reduce the risk of the pandemic outbreak including, social distancing (Mehta, 2020;Ramesh et al, 2020), isolation (Yıldırım, Geçer, & Akgül, 2020), lockdown (Mucci et al, 2020), and many more (Lakshmi Priyadarsini & Suresh, 2020). This region also practices hand and respiratory hygienic conditions, social distancing, social isolation, fear of the risk of infection, and other COVID-19 risk reduction procedures (Banerjee & Rai, 2020;Ludvigsen & Hayton, 2020;Lum et al, 2020;Mehta, 2020).…”