public health england

Do you think the NHS or Matt Hancock is to blame? We seem to live in a political environment where it is always someone else’s fault these days….. My father-in-law was discharged from hospital with covid to a care home, he lived there as a virtual prisoner before recovering only to die of heart failure due to another underlying condition. We had to liaise with him from a car park on a mobile whilst waving at him in his bedroom during all of that. Thousand had similar experiences, someone was in charge and ultimately responsible at the time…..

Former health secretary Matt Hancock has blamed Public Health England (PHE) for failing to alert him to asymptomatic transmission of Covid after a court ruled that the government policy of discharging patients to care homes during the early stages of the pandemic was unlawful.

In a ruling on Wednesday, Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Garnham concluded that policies contained in documents released in March and early April 2020 were unlawful because they failed to take into account the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from non-symptomatic transmission of the virus.

They also said that, despite there being “growing awareness” of the risk of asymptomatic transmission throughout March 2020, there was no evidence that the then-health secretary addressed the issue of the risk to care home residents of such transmission.