Justice Secretary Robert Buckland has confirmed that the government had to protect the NHS over care homes at the early stages of the pandemic because of limited testing capacity.
“I think we needed to make a choice about testing and we did decide to focus upon the NHS,” he told Sky News.
“The issue with care homes is that we’ve got many thousands of different providers, different settings, there have been lots of examples of care homes that have mercifully stayed infection free, but sadly far too many cases of infection and then death.”
It was “essential” that the NHS was the government’s priority at the time, he said.
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