Those who failed care homes when Covid struck must accept the blame
SIR – Sir James Eadie QC, who represented the Health Secretary and Public Health England in fighting the claim that the Government acted unlawfully by failing to protect care homes from coronavirus (report, April 28), claimed: “As the evidence demonstrates, the defendants worked (and continue to work) tirelessly to protect the public from the threat to life and health posed by the most serious pandemic in living memory, and specifically sought to safeguard care homes and their residents.”
The evidence, however, demonstrates exactly the opposite.
This approach might work in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but here such a disconnect between reality and the people at the top should result in a jolly good clear out. Heads must roll. Philip Wilson-sharp
Fordwich, Kent
SIR – My wife was in a care home at the start of the pandemic. That particular home had no cases of Covid, the main reason for this being that it went into its own form of lockdown well before the official one, because the management did not submit to pressure from the Government to admit patients from hospitals.
I believe that if many care homes had adopted a similar policy towards the Government, high death rates might have been avoided.
Alan R Brown
Godalming, Surrey
SIR – “Ignorance” would not have been universal in hospitals (“Ignorance is no excuse for care home deaths”, Leading Article, April 28).
There would have been wise heads who knew better, but unfortunately no notice is taken of such people anymore, because of the corporate way in which the NHS is managed.
The modern hospital consultant’s complaint – “the only people who take any notice of me are the patients” – says it all.
Rod Storring
Retired consultant physician Saffron Walden, Essex
SIR – I take issue with this claim about the early stages of the pandemic: “Above all, one thing was known then: the elderly were the most vulnerable group” (Leading Article, April 28).
In the 1918 flu epidemic it was young people who had a higher casualty rate, presumably because the elderly had built up immunity in a lifetime of exposure to respiratory viruses.
It was therefore reasonable in 2020 to focus on measures to protect the young, when testing capacity was a fraction of what it subsequently became.
Dr Anthony Nicholls
Pinner, Middlesex
SIR – My mother died of Covid and other co-morbidities in a care home in January 2021. She had been there for more than 14 years.
A few years earlier, a woman had said to me: “It’s hard when they go on living and you have to go on paying, isn’t it?” What a strange attitude. Barbara Cooke Ipswich, Suffolk