Covid inquiry to look at impact on care services

The Covid inquiry will start examining the impact of the pandemic on care services for elderly and disabled people on Monday.

Bereaved families say they have been waiting for this moment for years, describing the way Covid swept through care homes as one of the clearest and most devastating failures of the pandemic.

Nearly 46,000 care home residents died with Covid in England and Wales between March 2020 and January 2022, many of them in the early weeks of the pandemic.

The government says it supports the inquiry and is committed to learning lessons from it.

There are key questions families and care staff want answering, including why the decision was made in March 2020 to rapidly discharge some hospital patients into care homes.

They blame this, in part, for seeding the virus into care homes in the early stages of the pandemic.

There are also questions about blanket "do not resuscitate" notices being placed on some care home residents by medical services, and about visiting policies which prevented families seeing their loved ones for months.

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Source: BBC News, 30 June 2025