27 April 2022: High Court Rules Government Dumping COVID Patients from Hospitals to Nursing Homes Without Testing "Unlawful" and "Irrational"

Government broke law discharging care home residents from hospital untested during Covid, High Court rules

This report comes from the United Kingdom, where that nation's High Court has ruled that government's practice paralleling Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive, in which COVID patients were dumped from hospitals into nursing homes without testing to verify if they were still infectious to free up hospital bed space, was both "unlawful" and "irrational". Here's the introduction to the story:

Boris Johnson’s Government broke the law by failing to protect more than 20,000 care home residents who died from Covid-19 during the pandemic, the High Court has ruled.

The policy of discharging patients from hospital to care homes at the start of the pandemic was “unlawful” and “irrational”, the court said.

Presiding judges Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Garnham said the Government’s policy was “unlawful” because they failed to take into account the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from non-symptomatic transmission of Covid-19.

They added that despite there being “growing awareness” of the risk of asymptomatic transmission throughout March 2020, there was no evidence that then Health Secretary Matt Hancock addressed the issue of the risk to care home residents of such transmission.

The judges suggested the guidance should have required patients to isolate from other patients for two weeks to avoid Covid spreading within the homes and added that these issues were not addressed until a further document in mid-April 2020.

“The common law claim succeeds against the Secretary of State and Public Health England in respect of both the 17 March and 2 April 2020 documents to this extent: the policy set out in each document was irrational in failing to advise that where an asymptomatic patient, other than one who had tested negative, was admitted to a care home, he or she should, so far as practicable, be kept apart from other residents for 14 days,” they concluded.

The ruling opens the floodgates for the families of COVID victims who died in U.K. nursing homes to sue the government for damages resulting from its reckless negligence. In the U.S., the governors of four states, New York's Andrew M. Cuomo, New Jersey's Phil Murphy, Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer, and Pennsylvania's Thomas Wolf implemented and sustained similar policies during the same period the British government did. A fifth governor, California's Gavin Newsom, also implemented a similar scheme at that time, but suspended it after just a few days so it was not sustained as it was in the other four states.