Nicola Sturgeon demonstrated a lack of “basic common sense” when she ordered the transfer of hospital patients with coronavirus to care homes, the Scottish Labour leader has said.
Anas Sarwar said the first minister must pay the price at the ballot box for her “unforgivable” decision to clear hospitals when the coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020.
The latest figures record six more coronavirus deaths in Scotland in the past 24 hours. Scottish government figures published yesterday also confirm 285 new cases of Covid-19 and a test positivity rate of 1.6 per cent — which is well below the 5 per cent cited by the World Health Organisation as suggesting that the pandemic is under control.
Sturgeon has frequently apologised for her “bad judgment” over the course of the pandemic, including on the day the UK death toll surpassed 100,000 in January. She said then that her biggest regret was delaying the implementation of testing for care home residents and staff: “These decisions were mine and I take responsibility for them . . . I am, and I always will be, truly sorry for any mistakes we have made.”
Jeane Freeman, the health secretary, admitted on Thursday: “We didn’t take the right precautions to make sure that older people leaving hospital going into care homes were as safe as they could be and that was a mistake.”
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An investigation by Public Health Scotland (PHS) concluded in October that there was “no statistical evidence that hospital discharges were associated with care home outbreaks”.
The Scottish government body was later censured by the Office for Statistics Regulation, which found that the data was in fact “consistent with a causal relationship” between hospital discharge and outbreaks. PHS had said asymptomatic staff were the most likely source of care home outbreaks.
Sturgeon said she only became aware that people without symptoms could infect others shortly before testing of hospital patients began on April 22. Staff testing did not begin until May 18.
Sarwar said the SNP’s management of coronavirus in care homes was “deeply, deeply frustrating and frankly it makes me deeply angry”.
He said yesterday: “At the time they were hiding behind medical advice but it doesn’t require medical advice — it is basic common sense that you do not send Covid-positive patients into a care home which is housing the people most vulnerable to the virus.
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“We have seen the devastating result of that where Scotland has the second-highest Covid death rate anywhere in Europe and we have seen all of the tragedies in our care homes both in terms of lives lost and the human tragedy of that, the impact on care home staff, and the devastation and worry that you have had among care home families.
“It was a catastrophic error and somebody has to take responsibility for it.” He added: “An apology should be forthcoming but an apology is not enough. People have lost loved ones, that was a decision that cost lives and I am not sure an apology is going to be a comfort to people that have lost loved ones.
“There has to be some responsibility taken for that and a full and urgent investigation into how that takes place because it is unforgivable.”
In an interview with LBC radio yesterday Sturgeon said: “Jeane Freeman is doing what I’ve been trying to do all along, which is not take that position that politicians traditionally take of refusing ever to accept that they might have got things wrong.
“We were faced, just over a year ago, with a global pandemic of a new virus that we knew very little about.
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“We took decisions that we thought were best, in good faith and based on evidence we had. As we have learnt more about this virus, if we could turn back the clock there are undoubtedly things we would do differently.
“I think it’s really important for public confidence, for accountability, for learning lessons for the future that politicians are open to that. That is what I have sought to do.” She added: “We have learnt lessons along the way, the number of care home deaths in the second wave of the pandemic because of some of what we learnt in the first wave were much lower.”
