Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Nicola Sturgeon’s care homes catastrophe

Nicola Sturgeon (photo: Getty)

Nicola Sturgeon is fond of telling Scots that the prevalence of Covid-19 is ‘five times lower’ in Scotland than in England. Or at least she was, until the Office for Statistics Regulation released a statement calling her data source ‘unclear’ and adding that ‘we do not yet have evidence to support the validity of these comparisons’. The SNP has been retailing the notion that Sturgeon’s response to the pandemic far outstrips that of Boris Johnson. The public may be on her side, but the facts are not.

One of the starkest — and deadliest — failures in handling coronavirus has been the Scottish Government’s care homes strategy. Initially at least, St Andrew’s House acted more or less in lockstep with Whitehall and on either side of the border elderly patients were transferred from hospitals to care homes to sandbag the NHS. Both governments were caught decanting patients before mandatory testing processes had been put in place. Both sectors have chronic problems in staffing, retention and low pay. Yet the outcomes have been worlds apart. In England and Wales, deaths in care homes have accounted for 28 per cent of all fatalities involving coronavirus. In Scotland, the figure is 47 per cent. English and Welsh homes have lost 3.7 per cent of their residents to the virus while homes in Scotland have lost 5.6 per cent. This is all the more remarkable since the care home population south of the border is almost 12 times the size of that in Scotland.

One explanation is the SNP government’s hive-like mentality. Dissenting views were pushed aside or ignored altogether. Professor Hugh Pennington told MSPs in April that the replication rate within care homes could be ten times higher than thought. Asked about his comments, Sturgeon said:

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