It's easy to criticise when you’re standing outside the stable door

Picture: Sky News

A few weeks ago I reflected on the decimation that has taken place in care homes during the pandemic (A duty of care), framed by the fact that, had my father lived beyond his actual death from Alzheimer’s last August, the chances of him surviving COVID-19 as it swept through the care sector, would have been extremely low. Today, on what would have been my dad's 91st birthday, the subject has been yanked back into public consciousness by Boris Johnson's remarks yesterday in Yorkshire that "too many care homes didn't really follow the procedures in the way that they could have" to counter the virus.

The jury is still out as to whether Boris was simply making an industrial gaffe (he was responding to the head of NHS England's call for better funding for the care sector), or there is something more nefarious behind the line he put forward. Many suspect a combination of the two. Either way, the care sector has born a substantial proportion of the coronavirus attrition in the UK, with at least 20,000 deaths recorded in England and Wales alone. The care sector has been understandably irked by the prime minister's comments. The National Care Forum's Vic Rayner told Newsnight that care homes had followed the government's guidance "to the letter", but added that it had come "in stops and starts", and with a lot of confusing, complicated additions to deal with. Others suggest that Johnson is being disingenuous: Mark Adams of the charity Community Integrated Care told Radio 4's Today that if this was genuinely Boris's view - implying that he was regurgitating a fed line - that things were "almost entering a Kafkaesque alternative reality where the government sets the rules, [care homes] follow them, they don't like the results, they then deny setting the rules and blame the people that were trying to do their best."

It's hard not to think that Johnson is setting the care sector up to take the fall for failings elsewhere in the government response to the pandemic. There is certainly evidence of a confusing communications chain: NHS guidance in mid-March said that COVID-19 patients should not be occupying NHS beds "unless [clinically] required to be in hospital". Arguably sensible at a time when the message was primarily about saving the NHS. On 2 April, however, rules on discharging patients to care homes were revised, stating that 'negative' tests for the virus weren't needed prior to transfers out of hospitals. Even then, the COVID-positive could, according to the guidance, end up in care homes as long as preventative measures like PPE and self-isolation were in use. That, then changed two weeks later when the government brought in mandatory testing for all patients leaving hospitals. NHS hospitals have denied that there was a system which farmed positive patients out to the care sector.

Unsurprisingly, Downing Street has defended the prime minister's comments, with a spokesperson saying that Boris had been simply pointing out that "nobody knew what the correct procedures were" because numbers of those with symptoms were then unknown. Johnson's own spokesman told lobby reporters this morning that the PM thought care homes had "done a brilliant job under very difficult circumstances" during the pandemic, with health secretary Matt Hancock telling the House of Commons, during an urgent question: "The PM was explaining that because asymptomatic transmission was not known about, the correct procedures were therefore not known”. He added that the government had been been "constantly learning" about the virus, and continuously improving procedures. That's as maybe, but the communities minister Lord Greenhalgh also told the Lords that the guidance given to care homes early on was "not as clear as it could have been". A refreshing piece of honesty.

Even if Boris is harbouring an ulterior motive for his comments, Greenhalgh's admission is one of the rare examples of the government being straight with the public during this crisis. From Hancock's debacle with testing targets early on (which were miraculously met on deadline day only to fall back the day after...) to the continuing disaster of the track-and-trace app, things have been far from perfect. But, then, nothing ever is, especially when entering the unknown of a new viral pandemic. In war, not every bombing mission or secret weapon works first time, or even at all. Just own up. People respond better to honesty than what clearly looks, sounds and feels like spin or obfuscation. More than 20,000 families have lost loved ones who were supposedly seeing out their final years in the comfort, safety and relative dignity of a care home, not to mention care home workers who have also died. It's insulting to their memories to simply say that homes didn't follow advice, when the testing procedure was all over the place and other measures, like providing PPE in adequate quantities, simply weren't there, or with care homes a second priority to hospitals.

The outcry over Boris's remarks is understandable. More critically, if it is a smokescreen for the examination of what happened in the first phase of COVID-19 wreaking havoc on these shores, the blame game would do well to move on so that the second wave, when it inevitably comes, can be addressed with the lessons learned.