Infection rate in care homes was twice national average

CARE home residents were twice as likely to have caught Covid during the first year of the pandemic than the general public, a study has found.

Researchers at UCL took blood samples from residents and staff at more than 200 English care homes between June 2020 and May 2021 and looked for antibodies made by infection.

They used specialised tests that looked for N-protein antibodies which are produced after infection, but not after vaccination.

Almost 10,000 blood samples were taken and revealed that one in three (34.6 per cent) residents and a quarter of staff (26.1 per cent) had contracted the virus.

At this time, just 16 per cent of people in the general population had caught the virus, according to data from Public Health England.

Dr Maria Krutikov, lead author of the study from UCL, said: “In the period we looked at, the proportion of care home residents with evidence of previous infection with Sars-cov-2 was more than double that of the general population.”

The repeated testing of blood samples from the same individuals showed that the antibodies fell below detectable levels after roughly eight months.

This means the figures for Covid infection in care homes, although twice that of the general population, is likely to be still a “marked underestimation”.

Gauging the true level of infection in care homes early on in the pandemic is complicated further because this study only tracks antibody levels in staff and residents who survived the pandemic.

According to the Office for National Statistics, almost 30,000 care home residents had died with Covid by May 7, 2021. If these figures were included to produce a true prevalence figure, it would be even higher, experts say.

The study also found infection levels varied with geography. Almost half (44.3 per cent) of those in care homes in London and the North East had contracted the virus, but in the East of England and the East Midlands the figure was 18 and 18.4 per cent, respectively.