How Covid spread in Sweden’s care homes

Why did Covid prove so lethal in care homes? Between 2 March and 12 June, there were 66,112 deaths of care home residents in England. Of these, 19,394 ‘involved’ Covid (in the Office of National Statistics’s own terminology) – 29.3 per cent of the total. As has been apparent from the beginning of this crisis, the risk of dying of Covid-19 sharply rises with age, so in that sense it is not surprising for deaths among care home residents to be high – but why has it proved so difficult to protect residents from the disease, not just in Britain but in many countries?

In Britain, there has been a focus on poor personal protective equipment and the practice of discharging elderly patients from NHS hospitals into care homes, without even testing them for Covid-19, thereby helping to send the virus into places where it was likely to cause the most damage.