SAGE warned the Government ‘very early on’ in Britain’s coronavirus outbreak that care homes would be COVID-19 hotspots, chief scientific adviser reveals
Britain’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, has revealed he and other senior scientists warned politicians ‘very early on’ about the risk COVID-19 posed to care homes.
The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has been meeting approximately twice a week since its first coronavirus discussion on January 22.
Sir Patrick, who chairs the group along with Professor Chris Whitty, said they had ‘flagged’ the risk of care home and hospital outbreaks at the start of the epidemic.
While warnings about hospitals sparked a ‘protect the NHS‘ mantra and a scramble to buy ventilators and free up beds, nursing homes saw no such efforts.
The Government has faced scathing criticism over the lack of support it has offered to nursing homes and their staff and residents, with no routine testing taking place in the homes and no up-to-date records of the number of people dying.
Data about care home deaths is being collected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), but was only first published on March 31 and is 10 days out of date each time it is released.
Care home staff and residents say they feel ‘forgotten’ and the World Health Organization has said that, in Europe, care homes account for half of all COVID-19 deaths.
Sir Patrick Vallance explained today that the risk of coronavirus spreading in hospitals and care homes was one of the first things the SAGE committee warned the Government about (Pictured: Sir Patrick at a Downing Street briefing earlier this month)
Explaining how SAGE works in a briefing this morning, Sir Patrick Vallance said: ‘We spend time to make sure we’re concentrating on the longer term areas that aren’t necessarily in anyone else’s vision at that time.
‘So very early on we looked at a number of topics, we looked at nosocomial infection very early on, that’s the spread in hospitals, and we flagged that as something that the NHS needed to think about.
‘We flagged the fact that we thought care homes would be an important area to look at, and we flagged things like vaccine development and so on. So we try to take a longer term view of things as well as dealing with the urgent and immediate areas.’
The SAGE committee, which draws in leading scientists from around the UK and rifles through scientific evidence about COVID-19, was activated on January 3 when Sir Patrick became concerned about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.
It met for the first time on January 22, suggesting ‘very early on’ in its discussions is likely the end of January or the beginning of February.
The first care home death in England and Wales was not officially recorded until March 31.
Staff have not been routinely tested for coronavirus like NHS workers have, and some are still struggling to get swabs despite the Government widening testing to all essential workers last week.
An investigation by the BBC yesterday revealed that only 51 out of 210 care homes questioned said any of their staff had been tested.
Asked what SAGE told the Government about the risk to care homes, Sir Patrick said: ‘I’m not going to go into specifics of exactly what we said and when; that will come out as the minutes [of SAGE meetings] are published.
‘We flagged up, or recognised, that institutions like hospitals, care homes and others were places that we were likely to get spread and did some work to try and identify what that might look like.
‘So those things will come out in due course and they’ve been, of course, sent through to the relevant people to make decisions on.’