The biggest mistake made at the outset of the pandemic was to discharge people from hospitals into care homes without being tested for coronavirus. As a result, those who were infected with Covid spread the illness to other vulnerable residents, thereby causing thousands of deaths. The High Court has now ruled that the policy was unlawful and led directly to the high number of fatalities in homes. This has considerable political and legal implications.
At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Boris Johnson said he was sorry for what happened but that “it was an incredibly difficult time” and not much was known about the behaviour of the virus. In particular, he said, it was not realised that it could be transmitted asymptomatically. Similarly, a spokesman for former health secretary Matt Hancock said Public Health England had failed to tell ministers what they knew about asymptomatic transmission and “he wished this had been brought to his attention earlier”.
In its defence, the Government pointed out that sufficient testing capacity was simply not available at the time. Moreover, the miserable isolation, almost incarceration, that elderly residents subsequently had to endure was rightly seen as inhumane – although it would not have been necessary later had the virus been kept out of the homes.
The court accepted that in reaching a judgment “hindsight is not permissible”. The issue is whether “the decisions taken fell outside the range of reasonable decisions properly open to the Government in the light of the knowledge then available and the circumstances then existing”.
Above all, one thing was known then: the elderly were the most vulnerable group and, had they been better protected, the total lockdown of the country to “save the NHS” might not have been necessary. The High Court said that while there was no scientific proof in March 2020 that asymptomatic transmission was occurring, it was well recognised by the experts that such transmission was possible. For ministers to claim ignorance now is not good enough.
They were obliged to weigh up not just the likelihood that non-symptomatic transmission was occurring, but also the very serious consequences if it did. They cannot now hide behind officials. It is hard to argue against the charge that they failed to protect care home residents by prioritising the objective of freeing up hospital beds.
The biggest mistake made at the outset of the pandemic was to discharge people from hospitals into care homes without being tested for coronavirus. As a result, those who were infected with Covid spread the illness to other vulnerable residents, thereby causing thousands of deaths. The High Court has now ruled that the policy was unlawful and led directly to the high number of fatalities in homes. This has considerable political and legal implications.
At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Boris Johnson said he was sorry for what happened but that “it was an incredibly difficult time” and not much was known about the behaviour of the virus. In particular, he said, it was not realised that it could be transmitted asymptomatically. Similarly, a spokesman for former health secretary Matt Hancock said Public Health England had failed to tell ministers what they knew about asymptomatic transmission and “he wished this had been brought to his attention earlier”.
In its defence, the Government pointed out that sufficient testing capacity was simply not available at the time. Moreover, the miserable isolation, almost incarceration, that elderly residents subsequently had to endure was rightly seen as inhumane – although it would not have been necessary later had the virus been kept out of the homes.
The court accepted that in reaching a judgment “hindsight is not permissible”. The issue is whether “the decisions taken fell outside the range of reasonable decisions properly open to the Government in the light of the knowledge then available and the circumstances then existing”.
Above all, one thing was known then: the elderly were the most vulnerable group and, had they been better protected, the total lockdown of the country to “save the NHS” might not have been necessary. The High Court said that while there was no scientific proof in March 2020 that asymptomatic transmission was occurring, it was well recognised by the experts that such transmission was possible. For ministers to claim ignorance now is not good enough.
They were obliged to weigh up not just the likelihood that non-symptomatic transmission was occurring, but also the very serious consequences if it did. They cannot now hide behind officials. It is hard to argue against the charge that they failed to protect care home residents by prioritising the objective of freeing up hospital beds.