Austria To Intensify COVID-19 Tests In Nursing Homes

Photo illustration (Alex Boyd / Unsplash)

JAKARTA - The World Health Organization (WHO) said that COVID-19 more often causes severe infections and death in the elderly (elderly). For this reason, more attention should be paid to the elderly. As recently done by the Austrian government.

As one of the countries in Europe that has successfully curbed the spread of COVID-19, Austria is not proud of itself. They are continuing to make efforts to gauge the extent of the spread of the virus by planning tests on every elderly or retiree residing in a nursing home on Thursday, March 17.

The Austrian government said testing the elderly is the next priority. Especially considering that the elderly often have many health problems that make them vulnerable to death from COVID-19.

“Our focus in the coming weeks is to test all staff and residents of the nursing home. In this case, ladies and gentlemen, the number is around 130 thousand people, "said Minister of Health Rudolf Anschober.

Therefore, testing on 130 thousand elderly people will obviously take some time. How could I not, Anschober said the daily testing capacity in the country of 8.8 million population was less than 15 thousand. Another problem is that the government also does not have definite data regarding a list of nursing homes most vulnerable to COVID-19.

The effort is a continuation of the early steps taken by the authorities, which were swift to close schools, bars, restaurants, non-essential shops and other gathering places about four weeks ago. In fact, compared to other European countries, Austria has already asked its citizens to live and work from home.

As a result, on Wednesday, Austria began to loosen its lockdown policy by allowing building material shops, plant sellers and small shops to resume sales. Interestingly, bigger shops and hair care salons are scheduled to be given permission to reopen on May 1.

Meanwhile, Austria has had a fairly low increase in daily cases so far, only 0.9 percent and the lowest in Europe. Likewise, the death rate also received the lowest predicate with 410 cases.