MORE than 43,000 deaths involving Covid were recorded in UK care homes between March 2020 and July 2022, after government left the sector without plans, adequate protection or enough testing, the Covid 19 Inquiry found yesterday.
The Covid Inquiry’s report on adult social care ruled that then health secretary Matt Hancock’s May 2020 claim to have thrown a ‘protective ring’ around care homes ‘right from the start’ was ‘unfounded’.
‘Quite the opposite was true,’ said its chair, Baroness Hallett. Thousands had already died in English care homes by then.
Hallett blamed ‘an absence of proper pandemic planning for the adult social care sector’, which ‘appeared to be something of an afterthought’.
A 2016 government exercise flagged the sector as a ‘particular concern’, but the work ‘had still not been completed’ when Covid struck.
About 25,000 hospital patients were discharged into care homes in England between March and mid-April 2020 without the testing capacity to establish their Covid status.
Guidance in England, Wales and Northern Ireland did not initially advise isolating them, ‘a significant omission’.
Care workers were left wearing bin bags, bed linen and festival ponchos, conditions the inquiry called ‘wholly unacceptable’.
GPs imposed blanket do-not-resuscitate orders on some residents, it heard.
Visiting bans left residents ‘isolated, abandoned and alone’ and relatives ‘wracked by a guilt that they do not deserve to carry’.
Jean Adamson, of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, called the protective ring a ‘cruel lie’. Her father, a Windrush pioneer from Barbados, died in April 2020. ‘Like so many thousands, he died alone, isolated, a victim of Covid, but also a victim of government negligence,’ she said.
GMB union national officer Natalie Grayson said: ‘Our carers were on the front line during the pandemic – they were left vulnerable and terribly exposed as our care homes turned into morgues.’
The recommendations, she said, ‘fall short of the root and branch reform our care sector needs’.
