The horrifying cost of Hancock’s Covid testing targets

The Telegraph’s splash of leaked WhatsApp messages about Matt Hancock and care home testing is a devastating reminder of the cost of those early decisions taken in Covid. The plight of care homes in lockdown is one of the worst aspects of the pandemic. The sheer scale of the deaths among this vulnerable population and the way the homes were forced to shut the doors to relatives for months has left tens of thousands of people traumatised.

Any insight into why certain big – disastrous – decisions were taken is important. Any suggestion these decisions were taken to help the government meet arbitrary testing targets is horrifying, if not entirely surprising. 

Hancock and his lawyers are threatening legal action against Isabel Oakeshott and the Telegraph for publishing these messages: he originally gave the entire cache to Oakeshott when she ghost-wrote his pandemic memoirs. When that book came out, she remarked in this magazine that the upside of doing this book was that she would get a ‘keen sense of anything murky requiring further investigation’.

She shared the messages with the Telegraph in the belief that there was something requiring further investigation, and here we are with an explosive story that Hancock requested to stop testing admissions to care homes from the community despite advice from Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty that this should happen. He told an official that ‘I do not think the community commitment adds anything and it muddies the waters’. This meant that the government committed to testing people moving from hospital to care homes but not from the community into these homes, instead saying that the latter was an ambition it would ‘move to’. Hancock himself later said Covid was spread in homes from the community, including by staff.

He also did not take up Whitty’s advice to segregate those coming from hospitals, despite initially suggesting he was keen on this himself. He said testing of asymptomatic staff and residents in homes where there had been an outbreak was ‘ok so long as it does not get in the way of fulfilling capacity in testing’. 

Hancock says this is a partial account of his messages, missing key exchanges and meetings. But it is already well known that the then Health Secretary was so fixated on his targets for daily testing that the system ended up operating in ways that didn’t practically make sense. His argument is that targets focus the mind and that testing was essential, so he needed to push the machine as hard as he could to get to the capacity the country needed. But the cost of missing a target remains far lower than the cost to care homes of a pandemic they were never really protected in.