WE have known for months that the Covid pandemic was hitting residents in care homes harder than almost any other group in society.

Now, official figures reveal just how badly, how unfairly those members of our society – parents, grandparents and friends – have been affected.

This is a failure at a societal level, and a shame for our country.

While those in care homes are, by their very nature, among the most vulnerable people either because of age or lifelong health problems, we also know that they were frequently not protected as well as they should have been.

We know that, during the early days of the pandemic, some hospital patients were sent out to care homes without proper checks and precautions to ensure there was no risk of them spreading the virus to other residents.

We know that the best precautions (masks, gloves, proper safety measures) were not taken at many homes for months into the pandemic, largely because we simply were not ready for this pandemic as a country.

Most of us can only imagine how terrifying it must have been for tens of thousands of care home residents across our country as it gradually became clear that they were more at risk of being killed by this virus than any other group of people in the country, and that they had not had the best protection from it. They were then put into an almost inhumane lockdown where they were forbidden from seeing all family and friends for the best part of a year.

If we knew last March what we know now, then all of these mistakes and so much of this unnecessary suffering could have been avoided.

The Prime Minister has now announced that a full review into the entire country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic will indeed take place – though it won’t begin until next year.

Care homes must be at the top of the agenda for this review to ensure these mistakes do not happen again.