During the final week of 2020, nursing homes in Denmark registered the largest nationwide tally of COVID-19 infections among residents and employees, local media and municipalities informed on Monday.
Authorities have registered coronavirus outbreaks in 116 out of the country's 942 nursing homes, reported the Danish news agency Ritzau.
At Kildebo Nursing Home in Lolland, 138 km south of the capital of Copenhagen, 32 of the 60 residents and 30 out of 70 employees are infected with the coronavirus, according to a press release from Guldborgsund Municipality Monday.
"It is a serious and unfortunate situation with so many infected. As the situation is serious, we have to move employees from other care centers and home care groups to help at Kildebo," said center manager Ida Byrge Sorensen in the press release.
Meantime in Aarhus, the second-largest city of Denmark, a nursing home for those suffering from dementia, employees have taken the brunt of infections -- 41 care workers contracted the virus, compared to 21 residents -- Danish media TV2 quoted Tina Grove, acting head of dementia in Aarhus Municipality, as saying.
However, the government is hopeful it will bring the problem in nursing homes under control by the end of January when they should be fully vaccinated, according to a statement by Minister for Health and Elderly Affairs Magnus Heunicke during the vaccine roll-out on Dec. 27.
Denmark's Statens Serum Institut (SSI) reported on Monday 2,076 new COVID-19 infections and a further 15 deaths in the past 24 hours.
To date, the country has registered 170,787 COVID-19 cases and 1,389 deaths, according to the SSI.
As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in some countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines.
Meanwhile, 232 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide -- 60 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Dec. 29.
