Dr. Siobhán Kennelly:

I want to bring us back to where we were in February and March and what we were seeing in acute hospitals in Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Key considerations in some of the decision-making that happened in this regard were the risk issues pertaining to older people in acute hospitals who themselves might have become victims of Covid introduction to those hospitals. Two facets of these hospital discharges were very much being balanced at the time. These were the risk to older people who would be inappropriately in hospital and exposed to risk of infection and the need for them to be cared for in a more appropriate place. Lessons learned about asymptomatic transmission, testing protocols and isolation protocols have all been introduced since on this basis.

Clearly, there has not been a substantive link made between those transfers and evidence of wholesale transmission into nursing homes of Covid-19. It seems that local community transmission of Covid-19 and staff transmission rates probably played a more important role in terms of how infection was introduced.