Guidance from the Department of Health and Social Care at the start of the pandemic did not even mention the need to test care home residents before discharging them from hospital. This didn’t change until almost a month after the country went into national lockdown.
This is despite clear evidence of the terrible toll the virus was already taking in care homes in countries like Italy, and repeated warnings from care homes, trade unions and MPs.
In that time, 25,000 people were discharged from hospitals to care homes without a Covid-19 test. Mr Hancock now claims he was having to ‘build testing capacity’, but it would have taken less than 5 per cent of all the Covid19 tests that were done by 20 April to test every single one of these discharged patients.
Thousands of families who lost their loved ones don’t need Dominic Cummings to tell them the Government’s rhetoric about putting a protective shield around care homes was ‘complete nonsense’ – the evidence is there for everyone to see.
