Covid Pandemic: Testing of Care Home Residents Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department of Health and Social Care
Derek Twigg
Main Page: Derek Twigg (Labour - Widnes and Halewood)Department Debates - View all Derek Twigg's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
Covid Pandemic: Testing of Care Home Residents
Derek Twigg Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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Helen Whately
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about how we ramped up incredibly fast from a capacity of just 3,000 tests a day in March 2020, to more than 38,000 in mid-April, and more than 100,000 by May. We were then able to test many millions per week during the course of the pandemic. That was the most extraordinary increase in the capacity to produce, carry out and analyse tests, and he is absolutely right to draw attention to it.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
The Minister said that what my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) said was shocking. What is shocking is the number of people who died but who might have been saved in the first place. Is the Minister really saying that, at the beginning of the pandemic, there was no rush to get people out of hospital and back into the community without being tested?
Helen Whately
The questions about the discharge policy have been interrogated on a number of occasions, including by Select Committees. The hon. Gentleman will well know that in general, and in the work that we are doing now on discharge, it is rarely good for somebody who is medically fit for discharge to continue to be in hospital beyond that time. So of course it is right that when people are medically fit, they should be discharged home. The guidance of how that was done was set out on a number of occasions during the pandemic, and that guidance was updated both as we learned more about the virus and as greater testing capacity became available.