It's a stark contrast to the aged-care disaster unfolding in Victoria — a group of nurses clapping and dancing in a nursing home, celebrating a major win against the coronavirus.

The impromptu party at the facility in Sydney's inner west was sparked after confirmation it had averted a COVID-19 outbreak, despite an employee working while infected with the virus last month. An email sent hours before her shift started at Ashfield Baptist Homes could be behind the success.

Once inside aged-care homes, COVID-19 can have devastating effects. In Melbourne, more than 300 nursing home residents infected with the virus have been transferred to hospitals, and yesterday 12 of the state's 15 COVID-19 deaths were linked to aged care.

The Ashfield facility, and its 136 elderly residents, was also vulnerable when the employee turned up for her night shift at 10:00pm on July 15. Unbeknownst to anyone, she had contracted the virus six days earlier while having dinner at the Thai Rock restaurant in Wetherill Park — a cluster which has since been linked to more than 100 COVID-19 infections.

However, an email sent by the Sydney Local Health District (SLHD) just five hours earlier is believed to have been critical in stopping the nurse infecting elderly residents inside the facility.

After a small rise in the number of coronavirus infections in NSW, the email advised staff at aged-care homes to wear face masks while on shift. The Ashfield facility's management acted immediately, instructing staff to wear masks along with the protective gowns and gloves they were already using.

Two days later, the care home got the call from contact tracers from the SLHD informing them of possible exposure. "To be honest there was a certain inevitability about it given what's happening in the local community," the facility's chief executive Leigh Kildey said.

"I feel any aged-care provider would probably feel the same, you're operating in an environment where you're just waiting for that call."

Within an hour of being notified about the possible exposure, the facility was in lockdown. It's impossible to know how many residents could have been infected had she not been wearing a mask. "We certainly feel really fortunate … we had the systems in place to be able to react really quickly to the directive," Ms Kildey said.

It was a scenario similar to the Newmarch House aged care home in Western Sydney, where a staff member had worked while unknowingly infected with the virus. In that case, 37 residents and 34 staff became infected and 19 residents died. At Ashfield Baptist Homes, there were fears they were heading for a similar catastrophe.

"Before the first round of testing most definitely, you play out those scenarios in your mind," Ms Kildey said. "Once COVID-19 comes into a setting where the population's quite vulnerable, it can have a catastrophic outcome regardless of the good systems that are in place."

She said lessons learnt from Newmarch House meant a specialist infection control team from NSW Health moved in immediately. "What worked well for us was welcoming the advice that we received from our local health district and the Public Health Unit," Ms Kildey said.

She also credits another key decision taken back in March. "We put all of our staff in surgical scrubs and we did that very deliberately so that we could launder and dry the scrubs at a certain temperature to kill any virus," she said. "We did that conscious of the fact that a lot of our staff catch public transport to and from work and it's really about a risk mitigation strategy to try to stop any potential contact coming in."

Read the rest of the article fro ABC News here https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-06/mask-order-helped-avert-coronavirus-outbreak-in-sydney-aged-care/12527518

This article was originally posted by ABC News on 6 August 2020. Original Article link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-06/mask-order-helped-avert-coronavirus-outbreak-in-sydney-aged-care/12527518