As the NHS was preparing for the Covid onslaught, thousands of hospital patients were discharged to care homes in an attempt to free up beds. This worked: about 40,000 NHS beds are now unoccupied, four times the normal amount for this time of year. Attendance at A&E has halved. Almost half of all intensive care beds with mechanical ventilators lie unused. This is before the seven pop-up Nightingale hospitals, most of which are also empty, are factored in. The NHS was effectively protected in this crisis. Care homes were not.
While those in hospital were being given the care one would expect from one of the world’s best-resourced health services, most care home residents who fell sick with symptoms of Covid-19 were not even being tested for the disease. That did not, of course, stop them from succumbing to it. The latest figures, for the week ending 17 April, show that just over a quarter of all Covid deaths were in care homes. In Scotland and Northern Ireland it is nearly half.
It wasn’t until this week that the government finally announced that from now on daily figures for coronavirus will include cases and deaths in care homes. China has been castigated for under-reporting deaths, yet Britain is scarcely better in this respect. According to the Health Secretary Matt Hancock, it wasn’t possible until now to collate the data from care homes. Yet from the beginning Italy managed to publish daily statistics on all deaths, so why couldn’t Britain?
The care home sector has been allowed to become the Cinderella of healthcare
It was known back in January, before the epidemic reached Britain, that coronavirus was especially likely to kill the elderly. But the care sector seemed to be forgotten about as plans were stepped up for
the NHS.
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