There was a good letter in the Telegraph yesterday, pointing out that SAGE and its modellers need to accept some of the blame for the care home fiasco. After all, if the Government and the NHS hadn’t been persuaded by their apocalyptic models that hospitals would be overwhelmed if they didn’t clear out elderly, care home residents, they wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to get rid of them.
SIR – Matt Hancock, the NHS and the Prime Minister have all been blamed by Dominic Cummings for the appalling care-home Covid deaths at the start of the pandemic, but I feel none of these are the real culprits.
At the time, pandemic data modellers were forecasting huge numbers likely to need hospitalisation. So the Government, using the Armed Services, built Nightingale emergency hospitals in double-quick time.
The NHS, spooked by alarmist modellers, cleared the hospitals of all the non-Covid patients they clinically could, anticipating a deluge of Covid patients. Unfortunately, no one knew of non-symptomatic carriers, and the care homes were infected, with devastating results.
The hospital deluge predicted by modellers didn’t materialise, nor anywhere near it. The Nightingale hospitals were hardly used.
So, in apportioning blame for the horrendous care-home deaths, excitable modellers and their statistics, based on unrealistic assumptions, must be the primary culprits. It was a case of “following the science” that led policy-makers astray.
Steve Male
Highampton, Devon
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