Last week, I was in Sweden, investigating whether the nation’s strategy to avoid lockdown during a pandemic has been a success or failure. The highly contentious issue has become ensnared in the global culture wars, although the arguments in favour of their sustainable stance have strengthened recently as spikes and second waves erupt around the planet. Yet one aspect of their approach is beyond debate: that a key reason for their high coronavirus death rates, among the worst in the world, was due to catastrophe in their care sector.
More than two-thirds of the 5,776 deaths in their population of ten million were older people in care settings, the majority in residential homes. There are grim stories of the elderly being given morphine and left to die rather than overload hospital wards, along with more familiar claims of failure to supply protective equipment and underpaid agency staff working across different locations. An official investigation found the deaths concentrated in 40 of Sweden’s 290 municipalities, with 91 homes needing further investigation. “We failed to protect our elderly,” admitted Lena Hallengren, minister for health and social affairs. “That’s really serious and a failure for society as a whole. We have to learn from this.”
A similar tragedy unfolded in Britain. The big difference was that our leaders chucked 25,000 elderly people out of hospitals, sending them into care homes that were sometimes paid to take them in order to clear space in intensive care units. Incredibly, many of these patients were not tested for coronavirus, despite being sent into places packed with the elderly and disabled people most at risk from this disease. Ludicrous Government advice still claimed, until 10 days before lockdown: “It remains very unlikely that people receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected.
Official data revealed that almost 20,000 care home residents in Britain died with confirmed or suspected coronavirus during the peak 10 weeks of pandemic, although excess death figures suggests the real numbers may be even higher. “Years of inattention, funding cuts and delayed reforms have been compounded by the Government’s slow, inconsistent and, at times, negligent approach to giving the sector the support it needed during the pandemic,” commented the Public Accounts Committee two weeks ago in a devastating indictment of failure.
Britain has the second highest number of deaths as a percentage of its nursing home population in Europe. (There are currently about 400,000 people living in 17,000 nursing and residential care homes across England). The worst was Spain, a country that likes to believe the family is at the heart of its society. Soldiers called in to help tackle the crisis found elderly people in care homes abandoned by staff, with corpses lying in beds; prosecutors are investigating whether to launch criminal cases. In Italy, another supposedly family-orientated nation, police launched probes into what were described as ‘massacres’ in huge care homes. Belgium has the world’s highest Covid-19 death rate, with two-thirds of fatalities occurring in nursing homes during its peak weeks of pandemic as the sector was overlooked in the rush to protect hospitals.
The same issues emerged in North America. The first major outbreak in the United States was centred around a Seattle care home run by one of the largest private operators, which was linked to 40 deaths. Now the world’s richest nation has the planet’s highest death toll due to its dire pandemic response, with four in 10 fatalities linked to long-term care facilities. Canada reacted better, resulting in a relatively low per-capita death rate. Yet an official study found 81% of its fatalities were in care homes — the worst rate among 16 wealthy nations examined and twice the average level in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations. “This report confirms what we all suspected: Canada is not taking care of our seniors as it should be,” said prime minister Justin Trudeau.
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