British care home coronavirus deaths ‘now matching hospitals’
Deaths from coronavirus in UK care homes and the community are now as high as in hospitals, with the outbreak yet to peak in residential facilities, top statisticians have warned.
Experts have called for staff at Nightingale hospitals, which have treated only a handful of patients, to be redeployed to care homes as new data suggest the sector is suffering 400 deaths a day from Covid-19. NHS data indicate a slow but steady decrease in hospital deaths, following a peak on April 8.
However, yesterday’s Office for National Statistics ( ONS) figures reveal that deaths from all causes doubled in care homes in the two weeks up to April 17, up to 7316 a week. Meanwhile, a new stream of data from the Care Quality Commission showed that between April 10 and 24 there were 4343 Covid-19 deaths in care homes.
Last night, experts said the virus could stay rampant in the social care sector “for weeks and weeks”, sustaining a plateau in the overall number of cases nationwide.
It came as the ONS put the official toll for the UK up to April 17 at 24,243, although the real total is likely to be far higher. The new figures put the UK on a trajectory to be the worseaffected country in Europe.
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, chairman of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University, said: “I would not like to say there has been a peak in care homes. I would push my neck out and say it is possible that there are as many Covid-labelled deaths occurring out of hospitals as there are in hospitals in England.”
However, Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, insisted the proportion of coronavirus deaths in care homes was around a sixth of the total.
Coronavirus accounted for nearly 40 per cent of all deaths in the week up to April 17 in England and Wales, the ONS data show, up from 33 per cent the previous week.
The figures reveal that more than 6500 deaths involving coronavirus have occurred outside of hospitals — those classed as “in the community” by the ONS.
Of these, only 1220 were outside care homes, with 883 taking place in private homes and 190 in hospices.
Last week the World Health Organisation estimated that up to half of all deaths from Covid-19 in Europe were taking place within care homes, warning of “an unimaginable” human tragedy.
Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University and a practising GP, said: “We should shift our resources from
Nightingale hospitals to nursing homes. Currently there are no patients in some of these hospitals. We need to put the same activity into nursing homes.”
Heneghan said care homes were caught in a “perfect storm” brought about by their dense populations and a lack of good infection control, due in part to inadequate PPE.
In London, more than half of deaths registered in the week up to April 17 involved Covid-19. The North West and North East also had a high proportion of Covid-19-related deaths, accounting for 42.3 and 41.1 per cent of registered deaths respectively.
Of deaths involving Covid-19 registered up to week 16, 77.4 per cent — 14,796 deaths — occurred in hospital with the remainder occurring in care homes, private homes and hospices.