Daily testing of staff begins at Anglicare’s Newmarch House – as deaths reach 15 and two more staff test positive

Staff at the Western Sydney aged care home will now be tested every day at the start of their shifts for COVID-19 as a male resident passed away on Monday, bringing the total number of deaths at the home to 15.

A 76-year-old female resident also passed away on Saturday at Nepean Hospital.

Two staff members also tested positive for the virus on Friday, despite the strict procedures and enforced infection control practices in place at the home.

NSW Health has deployed two infection control nurses to the home to review its procedures.

“We are investigating further as to how this occurred and we continue to work closely with the NSW Public Health Unit on this,” Anglicare said in a statement.

“The carers … were experienced with infectious disease situations which indicates just how contagious this is and how difficult to contain.”

There are now 63 confirmed cases linked to the home – 37 residents and 26 staff.

Following NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s open attack on Anglicare’s handling of the outbreak last week however, both the State and federal Governments now appear to have backed away from criticising the operator.

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said on Sunday he didn’t want to play “the blame game” and that criticism of the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) by Newmarch staff was not valid.

“We’d like a 100 per cent infection [control] … but it’s not a realistic situation in any human environment,” he said.

In a press conference on Sunday, Chief Medical Officer, Professor Brendan Murphy, also chimed in on the outbreak, stating:

“We’ve put significant resources into Newmarch House, we’ve put extra infection control practitioners in – but it’s a partnership. It’s a terrible tragedy – we’ve had two aged care facilities that have had very significant outbreaks, and fortunately we’ve had a number of others where they’ve been very quickly controlled.”

“It’s nobody’s fault that once you have really widespread transmission in a facility, as happened at Newmarch, most of those infections occurred you know from that initial infection. There have been some more recent ones in the last few days and that's why there’s a serious look at the infection control practices. And I know New South Wales Health and their facility managers are looking at whether they might take some additional steps to take some of the people off site. But that's being worked through in partnership as it should be.”