Thread by @lewis_goodall

NEW: Striking data from ONS. They say there 12,526 care home residents died (across all settings) from Covid-19 in two months.

But look at this. Of the deaths 72.2%, vast majority, took place in a care home itself, not hospital.

Now we can’t know how many were admitted to hospital and survived. But there’s a substantial imbalance between deaths in care homes and hospital.

On 2nd April, I reported from a care home which had been told if their residents got Covid they wouldn’t be taken to hospital. This data might suggest that idea policy was being observed in many other places.

Clear questions as to why more weren’t transferred to hospital given lack of capacity problems.

Lots of people in care homes are v frail and very old. It’s possible that disease took some of them rapidly, that moving them might have been too traumatic and doctors made those clinical judgments accordingly.

Nonetheless the disparity is enormous and will have to be explained.

A councillor in a large local authority said to me this week that he kept asking his exec are they sure that all those in care who need hospital are going. He said they answered yes but not altogether convincingly. Seems hard to believe that was true for all of that 72% either.

Overall, #COVID19 was the leading cause of death for male care home residents, accounting for 30.3% of deaths.

For female care home residents it was the second-leading cause, accounting for 23.5% of all deaths.

Heartbreakingly, ONS found that most common pre-existing condition for care homes deaths was Alzheimer’s/dementia.

So many of our most vulnerable have died and been at the centre of this unfolding tragedy without even being able to properly understand what was going on.

Also worth bearing in mind, lots of countries struggling with this, not just the UK. Data from European countries suggest 40-50% of all deaths taking place in care.

Also worth bearing in mind that until relatively recently, UK officials were saying numbers in Britain were much lower than they’ve turned out to be.

I’ve tweeted about these issues a lot. But there are still two big policy questions relating to care and Covid.

1) should more care patients have been taken to hospital?
2) Why were so many Covid positive patients discharged to care homes which were Covid free?

Of these the first is more nuanced. In many cases hospital care might have done little for residents and it’s typical not to move v old patients to hospital (numbers still high though)

Second much more cut and dry. It shouldn’t have happened and where it did it’s been disastrous