Care Homes: Covid-19 Testing

Lord Hain Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

I am aware of that guidance. It is sensible guidance. It is necessary to free beds in our NHS hospitals to make them available to those who need them more. It is also necessary to isolate people when we are not sure whether they have Covid. These are 80uncomfortable truths and I do not deny that this will result in uncomfortable outcomes for some patients. One aspect of the disease is that it targets care homes and I make no apology for those arrangements.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

Following the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, why in an English care home where a close relative of mine lives do staff and patients—including, astonishingly, patients discharged from hospital—still have to wait up to 21 days for the results of their Covid-19 tests?

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Lord gives powerful personal testimony. I cannot possibly argue with the details of his story, but I reassure him that the data I have is that the turnaround time for tests is, in the vast majority of cases, radically less than what he described. We are on course for hitting the target of 48 hours for a very large number of tests and 24 hours for a lot of tests.