“All the occupants of the top floor are COVID-positive,” the nurse warned us as we put on protective overalls, masks and gloves as we prepared to enter the nursing home.
It was Easter weekend in April 2020 and a clear blue sky and warm breeze obscured the fact that the nation is isolated. A new disease called COVID-19 was spreading rapidly.
Operator Andy and I were going to enter a residential nursing home that was trapped by the virus.
I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was going to witness would set the tone for a year-long investigation into how COVID killed thousands of elderly people in nursing homes.
This weekend we witnessed a team struggling to find the right personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks, gloves and aprons.
This is partly due to the fact that there was a global spread of PPE and the government was frantically trying to procure supplies from where it could. But there were other reasons that were not obvious at the time.
However, it was clear to me that carers and medical staff did not have enough of this equipment.
I walked down the narrow corridor and saw elderly patients in their beds. A man was struggling to breathe, and the staff was trying to calm him down. Another man named John begged the staff to let him go home.
“I want to get out of here,” he said. The nurse did her best to reassure him, saying that after recovering from COVID, she could go home.
Unfortunately, John died two days later.
Read more: Government breaks law by sending patients to COVID-free care homes Matt Hancock says “we worked as hard as we could to protect care homes”
Image: Sky News correspondent Nick Martin at a care home in April 2020
Resources for nursing homes were promised
In the previous months, nursing homes were issued with guidelines on how to respond to COVID. This guide was written by the already disbanded Public Health in England (PHE) and is at the heart of many of the early decisions made by politicians and government officials.
In February, PHE said the risk to nursing homes was low and even suggested that masks were not needed.
In March, management told nursing homes to continue as usual.
But as the infection rate began to rise, the new guidelines in April put nursing homes at the center of the fight against COVID.
They were asked to take elderly patients from hospitals so that beds could be provided if the NHS started to overload.
In return, they were confident that they would receive all the necessary resources to fight the virus.
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1:51 The daughter’s grief over the death of the nursing home
Unfortunately, this is where it starts to go wrong.
In fact, we know that doctors have been told not to test elderly patients before they are sent to nursing homes – the fear was that a positive test would delay discharge, which means that hospitals cannot make room for bed.
Thus, elderly patients were sent to nursing homes without a test.
This meant that no one had any idea who had COVID and who did not.
The nurses with their fragile PPE had no chance. The virus spread like wildfire. The staff is too ill-prepared to stop him. Older people are too weak to respond.
It was as if the fox had entered the henhouse.
Image: Home care staff could not get enough PPE or tests
Not surprisingly, the government has broken the law
Homeowners desperately wanted tests to find out who had COVID. But the introduction of this type of testing will take months, and even then not everyone met the conditions.
It all happened in front of me that weekend. This was by no means an isolated event – it was repeated up and down in the country.
We now know that the government has broken the law by discharging untested hospital patients into nursing homes during the early stages of the pandemic.
This is a fact that is neither surprising nor comforting for all those families who live with the pain of not knowing if their loved ones would survive if more was done to protect them.
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