‘Murderers’: Families slam secret Covid report

Relatives who lost loved ones in care homes during the pandemic have slammed a secret government report from 2020 revealing how policy decisions to prioritise NHS bed space detrimentally affected adult social care.

After reading the report, Dr Cathy Gardner, who took the government to court after her father Michael Gibson died of Covid in a care home, told openDemocracy: “These people are murderers.”

Gardner, whose successful case brought alongside Fay Harris found that the government’s care home policy was both “unlawful” and “irrational,” said the report “beggared belief”.

“They are murderers because they knew they knew it was dangerous,” said Gardner. “You don’t have to be an infectious disease expert to know that taking people out of hospitals that are full of Covid and sending them to a home for vulnerable people is going to be dangerous.”

The “lessons learned” report, disclosed to openDemocracy after a Freedom of Information battle with the Department of Health and Social Care, reveals failings in the department and an acknowledgement that prioritising bed availability in the NHS would be “to the detriment” of care homes.

Parts of the report detail a lack of understanding of the care home sector – for example, that “the differences between the NHS and ASC [Adult Social Care] were not well understood by all those working on the Covid-19 response,” and that “emergency planning had assumed that care providers would be responsible for their own response”.

“They knew that they should have been protecting the most vulnerable; they knew that not understanding social care was a problem,” said Gardner. “And yet, it seems from [the report] you’ve turned up, they themselves have had to admit again – we didn’t understand social care.

“It's almost as though no nobody working there had a relative that had gone into a care home. It’s staggering.

“It seems that they were just inexperienced, incompetent and focused on protecting their own reputations and ideology.”

Jean Adamson’s father Aldrick was living in a care home when coronavirus hit. He caught the virus in April 2020 and gradually became sicker. He later died alone in his room.

Adamson told openDemocracy the report confirmed the failures of the policy that led to her father’s death.

“It is shocking to see it there in black and white but it’s not surprising,” she said. “It says everything that we already know to be true, and it confirms it in writing.”

Adamson says that the elderly were “thrown to the wolves effectively – they were lambs to the slaughter”.

The secrecy of the review also showed a lack of commitment to transparency, said Adamson.

“The attempts to conceal this is shocking and disgraceful because it shows again that this government – the ones who commissioned this internal review – were more interested in protecting themselves from any criticism.”

More than 20,000 care home residents died in the first wave of the pandemic after the government allowed the elderly to be discharged from hospitals without a negative Covid test. At the time, health secretary Matt Hancock claimed to have thrown a “protective ring” around care homes, though there was no evidence that this took place.

Lorelei King, whose husband Vincent Marzello died in a care home in March 2020, told openDemocracy the report was “disgraceful”.

“[The report] reinforces that this is who they think are disposable,” she said, “our precious, older people; our precious, vulnerable people.”

King recalls the care home her husband was in struggling to access PPE: “[The care home manager] was desperately trying to source PPE and she said everything had been seconded to the NHS.”

The Covid-19 inquiry will look at the handling of care homes in Module 6, which is likely to call witnesses in spring 2025.