The British High Court of Justice has said that the policies followed by the government for the management of Covid in nursing homes in the spring of 2020 were “wrong”. In the text of the sentence, read by the breaking latest news, the judges censure “the decisions of the Ministry of Health and Public Health England (which corresponds to our Higher Institute of Health, ed) contained in the documents of 17 and 19 March and 2 April 2022″ defined “wrong” because they did not take into consideration the risk for elderly and vulnerable residents of contagion by asymptomatics, although this possibility was already known ».
Therefore, for the judges it was necessary to take into account the possibility that «an elderly patient transferred from the hospital to the nursing home could infect the other guests before showing symptoms or even not showing them. It is irrational – they reason – that the Department of Health and Social Assistance has not ordered the isolation for 14 days of asymptomatic patients admitted to a nursing home ”. The case was brought before civil justice by two citizens whose parents died in two RSAs in Oxfordshire and Hampshire. In the first wave, it is recalled in the sentence, 20 thousand British people died from Covid in this type of structures. According to the judges, “the ministers were obliged to weigh not only the probability that a non-symptomatic transmission would occur, but also the very serious consequences if it had occurred, even on the basis of the precautionary principle alone”.
In another passage of the document of more than 70 pages, some stages considered significant in establishing the responsibilities of the government are reconstructed, underlining that already on 6 March Professor Feguson of Nervtag, one of the advisory bodies on viruses, “indicated the evidence that the infectivity could be detected just before and just after the onset of symptoms. On March 8, 2020, three academic articles were published that indicated the real possibility of pre-symptomatic transmission of the virus. On March 12, the ECDC published a document confirming the fact that asymptomatic people could be infectious ».
The judges ignored one of the lawyers’ objection that “much of the evidence brought by the applicants was based on scientific models on paper and was not ‘real world evidence'”. Among other documents, a study by the Istituto Superiore della Sanità is also cited on the risk of transmission by asymptomatic patients in that phase of the infection. In Italy, almost all the investigations on the criminal justice front for people who died in the RSA have been archived or are moving towards archiving because in essence the crime of “culpable epidemic” is considered not applicable, which does not apply, as it is. formulated and by consolidated jurisprudence, in the case of omissions, such as those hypothesized in these events by the prosecutors.