[ad_1]
The ministers faced new charges on Wednesday of failing to prepare nursing homes for a pandemic, as it emerged that Covid-19 may have killed 22,000 residents in England and Wales, more than double the official number.
The Council’s welfare directors in England warned the government two years ago, in a series of detailed reports, about the exposure of welfare homes to a pandemic, The Guardian has learned.
They called for better supply plans for personal protective equipment, warning that “demand for PPE could quickly outstrip supply,” in addition to better infection control and a system for recruiting volunteers to help services expected to reach a critical point.
The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (Adass), which represents the directors of adult social services in England, told The Guardian that it carried out work to improve government planning for an influenza pandemic at the request of the Department of Health and Social Care. But he said: “We do not know if the government departments took into account any of the established recommendations.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Assistance said: “As the public would expect, we regularly test our pandemic plans, allowing us to respond quickly to this unprecedented crisis. Our planning helped prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed and means that we are past the peak of the virus. “
The new allegations come when Boris Johnson was accused of minimizing the threat to nursing homes in March, while a study by the London School of Economics (LSE) calculated the number of deaths by residents of nursing homes in England and Wales at 22,000, more than doubling the official estimate.
In a day of mounting pressure on failure to better protect the elderly and vulnerable against the coronavirus outbreak, Keir Starmer used the Prime Minister’s questions to ask why Public Health England (PHE) had reported in March that nursing home residents were “very unlikely” to become infected with Covid-19. This was PHE’s position when the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic and people were already dying in the UK.
The Labor leader said the government had been “too slow to protect people in nursing homes,” and Johnson was forced to admit that “the number of victims has been too high” in the sector.
Stamer said the final death toll from coronavirus, which currently stands at just over 40,000 in the UK, including nursing homes, hospitals and private homes, would be “profoundly appalling.”
The advice on the “unlikely” threat Covid-19 posed to nursing homes was amended on March 13 and Downing Street said it was drafted at a time when there were no infections in the UK. But the shock highlighted growing anger over the care and resources given to preparing nursing homes, as ministers focused on preventing the NHS from being overwhelmed.
In a sign of shifting priorities, the government announced a £ 600 million cash injection to nursing homes to help control the infection.
The 2018 Adass report prepared for the government followed a government pandemic planning exercise known as Cygnus, which uncovered the need to increase the capacity of care homes and the number of staff.
They claimed that front-line care workers would need advice on “controlling cross infection” and called for a system to bring together volunteers from families, charities and the community to help overwhelmed homes. They also called for new guidance on increasing PPE stocks, with a foreboding warning that “demand for PPE could quickly exceed supply.”
Care operators have struggled to limit cross infection, with outbreaks killing more than two dozen residents at some facilities in the space of a few weeks. Staff absences have been running from 10% to 20% and at the beginning of the crisis, the care industry complained that it was not covered by the government’s NHS volunteer scheme.
A survey of more than 100 nursing homes published Wednesday by the Alzheimer’s Society found that 43% still did not trust their supply of PPE, and one household resorted to placing bags around the arms, feet and hair of caregivers. About 58% of households said they could not isolate residents, and a third said they had received positive Covid patients discharged from the hospital.
The latest assessment of deaths in care settings by LSE academics found that more than half of all “excess deaths” in England and Wales, those above the five-year average for the period from 28 December and May 1, they occurred in nursing homes. They said that from March 13 to May 1, nursing homes accounted for 19,938 excess deaths.
Only 8,310 of them were specifically linked to Covid-19 by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), reflecting statements from care homes rather than death certificates.
The researchers added that deaths of residents of nursing homes in hospitals were not currently represented in the ONS figures, and that around 15% of deaths of residents of nursing homes occurred in hospitals, with a total of more than 22,000.
The authors of the report, Adelina Comas-Herrera and José-Luis Fernández, have been tracking the number of virus deaths in nursing homes worldwide since the start of the pandemic. They cited internationally raised concerns about deaths related to residents being isolated in their rooms, without adequate food, drinks or medical care, and not with the virus itself.
The ONS seemed to back up its estimate, saying its data showed just under 20,000 excess deaths recorded as of May 1 in nursing homes since the pandemic began.
“Of these, 8,312 have mentioned Covid-19 on the death certificate,” said a spokesman. “We are conducting additional analysis on all deaths of nursing home residents to be published in the coming days.”
Downing Street on Wednesday confirmed that the international comparison of death rates by country had been removed from the slide at the daily press conference, but denied it was shameful that the UK was now shown to have the second-worst figure after from the USA USA .
