‘Doomed to repeat history’: Fears Covid aged care outbreak issues still not fixed
Grieving families have warned the lessons from Victoria’s deadly aged-care Covid outbreaks that killed more than 600 residents have still not been learned. A new Herald Sun series explores how the virus reshaped the state.
Victoria
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Issues exposed by the deadly aged care outbreaks have still not been fixed, grieving families warn.
Residents and staff at more than 200 aged care homes were hit by the virus in 2020s second wave, after Covid was leaked from hotel quarantine and began spreading throughout Victoria.
More than 600 residents died, and another 1400 were directly impacted by the crisis, with some centres losing so many staff to illness they could not provide basic care.
A federal review into two of the worst outbreaks, St Basil’s and Epping Gardens, found 83 residents died but said the “stark” numbers did “not begin to convey the trauma and grief suffered by all residents”.
It found issues across emergency planning, preparedness, infection control and staff resourcing, and said “clinical governance was absent (at worst) or limited (at best)”.
Sebastian “Sam” Agnello’s mother Carmela, 92, died in the Epping Gardens outbreak.
He said, almost five years later, there had still been “no accountability for what happened, or how my mother died”.
“It’s something we’ll have to live with for the rest of our lives,” he said.
Frank Micallef lost both his parents after Charlie, 87, and Carmen, 92, caught the virus in two separate clusters within days of each other.
He fears many of the longstanding problems exposed by the tragedy are still a risk, and said “lessons get forgotten really quickly”.
“Unless people record and capture the lessons, we’re doomed to repeat history and that would be horrible,” he said.
“And it’s quite possible, in fact I guess you’d say it’s quite likely that at some point something like this will happen again.”
He said issues, such as the reliance on casual staff working across multiple locations, were “obvious” problems at the time and had still not been addressed.
“If it happened tomorrow, I don’t think the aged care operators know what they’re doing half the time and the government clearly hasn’t addressed the issues,” he said.
“There should have been more done by now.”
Council on the Ageing Victoria chief executive Ben Rogers said aged care residents bore a significant burden from both the pandemic, and our response.
“Only seven per cent of Covid-19 cases were in aged care facilities, yet they represented 75 per cent of Covid-19 deaths nationwide in 2020, which is crazy when you think about,” he said.
He said planning and communication had improved, but if another pandemic hit, staff shortages would still leave homes vulnerable to restrictions on moving staff between workplaces.
“I think a lot of lessons have been learned, but a lot of the same issues that existed then, such as understaffing in particular, are still issues today,” he said.
“You’d hope that the case of St Basil’s, for example, won’t happen again, but it’s not 100 per cent certain and I think that’s the scary part,” he said.
He said visitation “never” should have been denied, and we still needed to “have a reckoning” about how we treated aged care residents during Covid.
“To take away people’s human connections at the end of their life is really quite a harrowing experience to go through for them, but also their families who are still having to pay that price now,” he said.
He said this did not mean allowing known positive cases to visit, but called for a better balance between the risks of infection and social isolation.
“We know social isolation is an issue, yet we cut them off,” he said.
A spokesman for Federal Aged Care Minister Anika Wells said the Albanese government’s aged care reforms and greater preparedness in the sector has led to a significant reduction in COVID-19 case fatality in aged care.
“We have invested $157.8 million over two years from 2024–25 to continued COVID‑19 support for aged care, including to extend the Aged Care Outbreak Management Supplement and improve vaccination rates in aged care,” he said.
A state government spokesman said Covid was unprecedented and they rolled out measures necessary to protect Victorians and save lives, “particularly given the slow roll out of vaccines by the Morrison Government.”
“We worked closely with public health experts,” he said.
“We are currently undertaking a groundbreaking trial in our public aged care facilities – testing ultraviolet light technology for the first time to assess its ability to reduce infections and ease pressure on our aged care and health workforce during COVID-19 and flu peaks.”
Originally published as ‘Doomed to repeat history’: Fears Covid aged care outbreak issues still not fixed
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