Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Will deaths still fall now lockdown eased?
The number of people dying of Covid-19 in Kent continued to fall ahead of lockdown restrictions being eased, latest figures reveal.
Deaths from the virus across the county dropped by 37% in the week leading up to VE Day celebrations on Friday, May 8 two days before Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced social distancing measures were being relaxed.
But with the new rules seeing more people emerge from their homes to meet family and friends, it is expected figures released on May 26 and June 2 will give a true indication of whether the downward trend will continue.
For now, though, the statistics suggest Kent is well past the peak of the virus which saw 236 people die in a single week at the start of April.
That number dropped to 89 in the latest figures up to May 8 down from 141 the week before. At the same time, deaths in care homes fell 60% - from 59 to 24 - bringing the total to 255. That figure accounts for more than a quarter of the 1,002 deaths recorded by the Office for National Statistics across Kent. Seventeen of those have occurred at a single care home Grosvenor Court in Cliftonville, near Margate.
County councillor Karen Constantine
(Labour) was saddened by news of the deaths at the 62-bed site, which specialises in care for those with dementia, learning disabilities and Parkinson’s.
“It’s a shocking and devastating number of deaths,” she said. “KCC can’t fix the issue; it’s down to the government to reassess the safety in our care home system.
“This isn’t the fault of care home staff or managers - they are working incredibly hard.” On the day the latest figures were released, the head of the organisation which represents care homes in England strongly criticised the government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. Professor Martin Green, of Care England, said people who are most at risk of dying of Covid-19 should have been prioritised from the start. Giving evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee on Tuesday, he said there would need to be a “forensic examination” in the future to prevent a crisis in care homes from happening again.
“We should have been focusing on care homes from the start of this pandemic,” he said. “What we saw at the start was a focus on the NHS, which meant care homes often had their medical support from the NHS withdrawn.
“We also had the disruption of our supply chains for PPE. “We also saw people being discharged from hospital when we didn’t have the testing regime up and running. So despite what’s been said, there were cases of people who either didn’t have a Covid-19 status, or who were symptomatic, who were discharged into care homes. “Given that care homes are full of people with underlying health conditions, I think we should’ve looked at focusing on where the people at most risk were, rather than thinking about a particular organisation.”