Public Health England’s report, written in October, claims that only 1.6% of outbreaks in care homes had come from inpatients who had been discharged from hospital.
The analysis in this report is based on people who were tested in hospital – when the precise problem was 25,000 elderly patients were discharged to care homes without a Covid-19 test – and on people who were tested in care homes, when again we know at the time care home testing was extremely limited and didn’t included anyone who was asymptotic.
Instead of using partial data to try and rewrite history and avoid responsibility for the tragedy in our care homes, Ministers should be straight with people about what happened, learn the lessons from what went wrong, and put in place the long-term reforms to social care that families desperately need to make sure these terrible mistakes never happen again.
