Age UK sees increase in demand due to Coronavirus fears
The charity which supports the county's elderly has confirmed it has decided to close its day centres, as a result of the Coronavirus outbreak.
Kevin Moore, deputy chief executive of Age UK Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin, said they had also been inundated with calls requesting information and support in light of national media headlines forecasting a plan to quarantine the over 70s.
The decision over the day centres was taken on the grounds of safety, and Mr Moore said: "We do not do these things lightly."
He added: "With the day centre members we are now looking to support them in different ways, using our staff here and volunteers."
Mr Moore said that support could be through home visits, or by telephone.
He said: "The important thing is we keep in touch and people do not become socially isolated."
Mr Moore said they were in the process of putting together plans for how to support the people who would no longer be able to attend the day centres.
The deputy chief executive said that they had also received calls from people who believed that quarantine plans had already been put in place.
He said: "We had a number of calls this morning from people thinking it is already policy.
"Our message as Age UK is trying to reassure people that is not the case yet. There is plenty of guidance for people out there to follow and when that changes we will be ready to change with it."
Mr Moore said there had been an increase in calls from people looking for potential help with things like shopping deliveries.
He said: "We have clients in our service we do that for already but we have had a number of calls from other people asking if we could so that is something we will be looking at."
Mr Moore said he expected community resilience to come to the fore as people deal with the challenges of the impact of Cronavirus.
He said: "I think we are going to see a real upsurge in very local community resilience around this. Where I live, yesterday afternoon within two hours we had set up a WhatsApp group for all the people who live there with a view of identifying vulnerable people who may be asked to self isolate themselves and find people to buddy up with them to do shopping, pick up prescriptions – and that is something we are doing as a community."
