British health authorities violated the law by overlooking the risk of placing untested elderly patients into care homes in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the High Court ruled on Wednesday.
Two women – Cathy Gardner and Fay Harris, who lost their fathers to the virus in early 2020 – sued the then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Public Health England over how the initial outbreak of Covid-19 had been handled.
Despite rejecting their other claims, the judges sided with the complainants, who questioned the government’s directives on the use of care homes at the start of the outbreak in the UK.
Last month, the lawyer who represents Gardner and Harris said that those orders had contributed to the death of some 20,000 patients in England and Wales between March and June 2020. “Put together, the various policies were a recipe for disaster and disaster is what happened,” he explained.