had little capacity to test for coronavirus when the pandemic began, and many asymptomatic patients were quickly released from hospitals back into care homes, where COVID-19 soon ran riot. “Of course, I want to renew my apologies and sympathies for all those who lost loved ones during the pandemic, people who lost loved ones in care homes,” he added. “The thing we didn't know in particular was that COVID could be transmitted asymptomatically in the way that it was, and that was something that I wish we had known more about at the time,” Johnson said in the House of Commons.
The judges backed some parts of the lawsuit's arguments but rejected claims made under human rights legislation and against the National Health Service.īritish Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the government would study the ruling and respond “in due course.” He said officials had to make difficult decisions at an “incredibly difficult time” when “we didn't know very much about the disease.”
Their lawyers said the decision - which allowed COVID-19 to spread among the elderly and vulnerable - was “one of the most egregious and devastating policy failures in the modern era.” The ruling came in response to a lawsuit by two women whose fathers died when the virus swept through the homes where they lived. government should have advised that discharged hospital patients be kept separate from other nursing home residents for 14 days - something that didn't happen in the first weeks of the country's outbreak.Īround 20,000 people died with the virus in British nursing homes during the initial months of the country's first outbreak in 2020.