I would propose they be part of the bubble in the way they were during the actual pandemic. Many staff in care homes were living on site. Hospital and care home staff can have the best PPE and be subject to rigourous testing and hygiene protocols. Hospital staff were working in an environment that was already probably carrying one of the highest risks of infection. If protocols are followed properly there is little reason why these places could not function as they actually did during the pandemic (the numerous failures notwithstanding i.e PPE procurement, discharging patients from hospitals) while the public at large cracked on.
You propose that under your plan, care home workers live on site. There are over 17,000 adult care homes in the UK, housing approximately 500,000 residents. When surveyed in April 2020, 24% of care home owners in the survey sample said that some or all of their staff had moved onto site. That's 13,000 care homes where this didn't happen.
You're talking tens of thousands, maybe over a hundred thousand care home staff, the vast majority of whom are women, many of whom will have school-aged children and families to look after. Do you realistically expect to find enough staff willing to 'live in' care homes, to staff all 17,000 of them?
You also can't hermetically seal a care home, so there's plenty of opportunities to be infected by one of those working-age people who are there for work purposes, doctors, nurses, paramedics for example - all of whom are working in a healthcare system where they are exposed to COVID routinely, because under your proposal, no healthy, working age people are subject to restrictions.
Where was this 'best PPE' coming from? Remember, you're proposing to set this up in March 2020, when the whole world is scrambling around for PPE. The government quite plainly didn't procure sufficient PPE of requisite quality, and this failing has been widely recognised, so you'd face the same problem, unless you have a magic solution for PPE that they didn't have?
You talk about "rigorous testing", but there are two issues with this:
1. You yourself believe that COVID PCR tests are "unfit for purpose" and tell you nothing about infection, so why are you now proposing "rigorous testing" to prevent the spread of infection, when you personally believe that PCR tests are not fit for that purpose? Either you're just making stuff up now, or you were making it up when you said this:
Did you know for example, the PCR tests this is all based on are completely unfit for purpose? It cannot tell you anything about infection.
Which one? Were you lying when you said PCR tests are unfit for purpose and cannot tell you anything about infection, or were you lying when you said that you believe that rigorous testing could prevent infections?
2. You are again, proposing to "rigorously test" hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers at a time when there wasn't sufficient testing capacity to do this. We didn't hit 100,000 daily tests until late April/early May, and if you're testing every single person who works in frontline health and social care, even if you're testing them every three days, you're going to need more than 100,000 tests a day.
Your proposals are unworkable.
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