Coronavirus: Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore have had no Covid deaths in care homes - so what can they teach us?

It is hard to fathom, given what we know now, that as recently as March care home operators were being told that they were “very unlikely” to experience an outbreak of Covid. The Public Health England guidance, first issued on February 25 and adopted UK-wide, twice states that people receiving care in the community or in residential homes were “very unlikely” to become infected. The document was finally withdrawn on March 13 –coincidentally the same date that Scotland’s first Covid patient died – though the majority of care home providers in Scotland had already closed their doors to visitors two days earlier as the scale of the potential threat became clear.