The coronavirus scandal no one is talking about

For months, mental health charities and Labour politicians have been telling the government truths that were so self-evident to anyone with experience of mental health they shouldn’t need telling. People with learning disabilities and autism faced exceptional risks to health and life from Covid-19. They were likely to die because now, as always, they are the last patients the NHS thinks about when the screws tighten.

And so it has proved. I could quote dozens of warnings, but let one stand for them all. On 5 May, Labour’s shadow secretary for social care, Liz Kendall, urged Department of Health and Social Care minister Helen Whately to publish data on deaths reported to the Learning Disabilities Mortality Review Programme. The idea that people with learning disabilities and autism were not dying at a disproportionate rate made no sense whatsoever.

Kendall understood that in modern bureaucracies what isn’t counted doesn’t count. Unless the Department of Health and NHS were seeking and publishing information on excess deaths, you could place a bet you were sure to win that they were not trying over-eagerly to prevent them.