'Throughout this crisis,' said Britain's Health Secretary Matt Hancock in a video message to the nation today, 'we've ...
'Throughout this crisis,' said Britain's Health Secretary Matt Hancock in a video message to the nation today, 'we've been working incredibly hard to protect people in social care and today we can announce that everybody going from hospital into social care will be tested, and will be isolated while the result of that test comes through, because that helps to protect people who are in social care who are after all some of the most vulnerable people in the country.'
I had to watch this several times before I could fully comprehend what I'd just heard.
So, let me get this absolutely straight: we've spent the past few weeks sending hordes of elderly people out of hospitals where coronavirus is rife, back into care homes without testing them for the virus?
This is the very epitome of the phrase 'lambs to the slaughter', isn't it?
Yet this strategy supposedly constitutes 'working incredibly hard to protect people in social care'?
The result of this appalling negligence – there's no other word for it - is that Britain's care homes are now exploding with coronavirus, both among the residents and the heroic care workers trying to look after them, often without adequate Personal Protection Equipment.
The situation is so catastrophically bad that the Government has no idea how bad it is.
I asked the Care minister Helen Whately on Good Morning Britain today if it was true, as the Daily Mail screamed on its front page, that as many as 4000 people may have died in care homes – but she hadn't a clue.
In fact, she laughed as I asked the question, just as she laughed again later in the interview during a startlingly inappropriate and jarring performance that exposed both her shocking ineptitude and the Government's worrying reliance on incredibly inexperienced people to handle the worst crisis we've faced since World War 2.
I'm on a WhatsApp group chat with a few top TV news journalists and we all agreed this morning that we could never recall a time when both the government and opposition ranks seemed to be so lacking in calibre, with the honourable exception of Chancellor Rishi Sunak who has been commendably authoritative during his press briefing stints.
Nobody pretends this is an easy time to be running the country, or any country.
But it feels increasingly, disconcertingly evident that many of the people charged with doing so in Britain don't have a clue what they're doing.
It was bad enough that we were so woefully under-prepared for the pandemic, given we had literally held a three-day training exercise in 2016 to prepare for one.
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