While the epidemic seems to be decreasing in many countries, including Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Australia and several others, there seems to be a serious problem appearing in other countries, notably France, Sweden and also Poland: care homes and nursing houses. These are typically intended for elderly people who often are in so poor shape that they need personal assistance. If any nurse of such an institution has the coronavirus, it is bound to spread widely among the residents.
This problems is clearly visible in wordometers data of coronavirus
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
If you look at the entry critical or serious from yesterday and compare it to today and to the number of dead from yesterday to today is is in most cases clear that the dead are mostly not people who were earlier classified as critical. That means that they died somewhere else. That somewhere else could be at home, but most probably it is nursing homes.
I have no suggestions how to solve this problem. Half of infected are asymptomatic, so only testing could show if they have a virus or not, but all nurses cannot be tested all the time, every day before they start working, and therefore some will manage to infect people in these homes.
Forbidding visitors in such institutions naturally helps to some extent, but most likely the virus it carried by personnel. Social distancing between the personnel and residents is not possible due to the nature if the work. Social distancing of the personnel from the rest of the world is difficult and hardly fool proof. The best I can propose is protective clothing for the personnel.
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Where I live there are two types of care homes and nursing houses : the public ones, financed for the major part by public funds, and the private ones (run by private owners) which are only partially funded by public money.
From the point of view of a candiate resident, the public ones are cheaper than the private care homes. Though the infrastructure may be newer and better in those private houses, the care itself is not necessarily any better than in the public homes : the profit principle being the basis of their existence, they need to make those profits among other things by reducing where possible the amount of personnel, as well as their social advantages (not the salary itself, which is legally protected here by a minimum wage).
Personnel in care homes and nursing houses is unfortunately not paid very well either in comparison with other jobs (f.i. with salaries in hospitals), and as a consequence at the first opportunity these people change easily from one job to another one, which is not good for the care of course. Briefly part of the personnel doesn’t seem to have a real commitment to the people they are caring for, unless they have an innate vocation for this profession. When there is lack of motivation and lack of responsible attitude in normal times by many of them, how should we expect a more responsible attitude in times of crisis ?
The number of corona virus victims in the care homes is starting to increase now daily here, and in certain homes the problems are very serious, with numerous death in the same place. As a consequence the government is forced to take measures now to support the sector in order to restrict the number of victims. I doubt it will make a big difference though, given the context which I described above. I don’t see a solution for this either.
Belgium, like Netherlands, has surprisingly many dead, but it looks like social distancing has some effect.