The NHS has been protected – care homes have not

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.