“You could see what was coming… and it was like your worst nightmare. Because you felt like, oh my God, I’ve never seen anything like this before,” says Eileen Chubb, who runs the charity, Compassion in Care, describing her horror last March as Europe’s care homes were ravaged by COVID. News bulletins reported residents abandoned to fend for themselves and workers forced to continue their jobs without proper protection. And all the while, the death rate among residents climbed higher and higher.
Chubb says the situation that unfurled when COVID reached the UK was “horrendous” but, for her, sadly not surprising. For years, she has campaigned on the behalf of elderly people, who she says are “treated as separate citizens in this country, but [with] less rights”.
The picture across Europe was not a pretty one. It is no coincidence that in February, the International Long-Term Care Policy Network estimated that 41% of COVID deaths in Europe were care home residents. “It went through care homes like a fire,” says Chubb, recalling receiving calls from terrified staff in care homes in Spain and Italy.
