The Telegraph’s splash of leaked WhatsApp messages about Matt Hancock and care home testing is a devastating reminder of the cost of those early decisions taken in Covid. The plight of care homes in lockdown is one of the worst aspects of the pandemic. The sheer scale of the deaths among this vulnerable population and the way the homes were forced to shut the doors to relatives for months has left tens of thousands of people traumatised.
The cost of missing a target remains far lower than the cost to care homes of a pandemic they were never really protected in
Any insight into why certain big – disastrous – decisions were taken is important. Any suggestion these decisions were taken to help the government meet arbitrary testing targets is horrifying, if not entirely surprising.
Hancock and his lawyers are threatening legal action against Isabel Oakeshott and the Telegraph for publishing these messages: he originally gave the entire cache to Oakeshott when she ghost-wrote his pandemic memoirs.
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