Dr. Colm Henry:

I totally agree. As I said in answer to the previous question, community transmission is the single biggest predictor we have. One of the fortunate things now is that we have very low levels of community transmission. Hence the greatly reduced number of outbreaks in all residential care facilities.

There are a number of differences, generally speaking, between public and private facilities which do not apply across the board, thus making comparison a little more difficult. Our public facilities tend to be older infrastructually, have different types of staffing and, speaking from professional experience, tend to accept more frail and perhaps dependent people in comparison with private facilities. That is not to say that private facilities do not accept frail, dependent and unwell people but there is a certain differential that makes it difficult to compare like with like.