No science to test care home patients at Covid start, says Gething

There was no scientific advice to test all patients discharged from hospitals into care homes at the start of the Covid crisis, a former Welsh health minister has said.

Vaughan Gething, who was in the post when the pandemic struck, said that "with hindsight" testing everyone "could have reduced risk".

In his fifth appearance at the Covid inquiry, he faced questions about the decision to discharge patients to prepare hospitals for an expected wave of coronavirus cases.

He accepted a 14-day delay in providing guidance that people could not be discharged into care homes without a negative test should not have happened.

Gething was asked about the risk of people without symptoms being infectious and what was known about that before the care home policy was announced on 13 March 2020.

Laura Paisley, counsel for the inquiry, said even if it was not specifically discussed with him, "would you agree by that date that you were aware of the possibility of asymptomatic transmission and that it could not be ruled out?"

The Member of the Senedd (MS) for Cardiff South and Penarth replied: "I'm not sure I could say by 13 March I was aware of the possibility of asymptomatic transmission.

"We discussed transmission and the clear evidence and advice was that symptomatic people were the risk.

"But that doesn't mean it (asymptomatic transmission) could be ruled out."

Asked whether at that point "at the very least" there should have been a policy to isolate untested patients being discharged into care homes, Gething said: "That wasn't the evidence and advice that we had at the time."

He added: "There was no advice that came to me saying 'you should test everyone who is leaving a hospital'.

"That advice was never provided to me at this point in time. And I think it's very hard to re-second guess all that and say 'at the time should you have known' when actually I didn't.

"Looking back though, of course in hindsight you can see that actually you could have reduced risk if you had been able to test on discharge and that would have relied not just on capacity, but on the speed of turn-around from testing as well."

Ministers decided on 15 April that people should not be discharged into social care unless they had tested negative for Covid.

But guidance on testing for the care sector was not published until 29 April.

Paisley said: "Do you accept, along with the Welsh government, that was a delay that simply shouldn't have happened?"

Gething said: "Yes, it's part of the concession that I don't attempt to walk away from.

"From the decision to the guidance going out it has to be accepted that the guidance could have been provided earlier."

Similar decisions on testing were introduced earlier in the rest of the UK.

Gething said the Welsh government was "on the back foot" because the UK government did not share information about testing earlier, but that did not explain the 14-day delay before the Welsh guidance was published.