Why Nobody In My Dad's Nursing Home Died of Covid

First off, if you lost a loved one during COVID, I want to say how truly sorry I am.

Before I dive in, a quick qualifier: everything I’m sharing here is based directly on what we were told by healthcare professionals, doctors, NHS nursing staff, and the team at my Dad’s nursing home. I've backed it up for this piece with a number of Google gemini searches. 

To understand what happened during COVID, we have to go back to the winter of 2017/2018. That was the year a particularly severe strain of flu hit the UK. Official statistics from the Office for National Statistics (according to Google Gemini) show that excess winter mortality, which measures deaths from flu, cold snaps, and secondary respiratory infections, reached 50,100 in England and Wales. It was the highest winter death toll since 1975/76.

At my Dad’s nursing home, the impact was immediate. They normally saw maybe one or two deaths in a typical winter; that season, seven residents passed away. The care staff told us plainly that people with this strain of flu would simply go to sleep and never wake up.

Dad got dangerously ill. I remember leaving his bedside one evening convinced it was the last time I’d ever see him alive. Miraculously, after two courses of antibiotics, he slowly began to recover.

During that episode, he was admitted to our local acute hospital. After his tests came back confirming the flu strain, the entire hospital had to be put under isolation to protect other patients. The situation felt completely surreal: for the first 48 hours, while waiting on test results, he had been free to mix with people. Then, suddenly, everything changed. Dad had dementia and had no idea what was going on. He was put into strict isolation, and Mum wasn't even allowed in the room. She had to stand outside, looking at him through the window.

When we mentioned to the nursing staff that Dad had received his flu jab, they explained how tricky the vaccine process is. Nursing staff explained that flu prediction is as much an art as it is a science. As they explained it to us, strains circulating in Australia are used to formulate the UK’s winter jab, but that year’s harsh strain didn't hit circulation until after the production cut-off, rendering the standard vaccine largely ineffective for that wave. I fact checked this and Gemini said “The 2017/18 vaccine wasn't ineffective because it missed a late strain, it was because the main strain (H3N2) mutated inside the chicken eggs used to grow the vaccine batch, making it less effective in elderly adults.” Either way the flu jab that winter was ineffective. 

Alarmed by the cluster of deaths, Dad’s nursing home conducted an internal review. They discovered the virus had been brought into the home by residents discharged back from the hospital. Taking immediate action, they implemented a strict new policy in 2018: anyone returning or admitted from a hospital had to go into mandatory two-week isolation.

That policy was still active when COVID broke out in 2020. Having this policy in place the nursing staff told us was why there was no Covid deaths in that nursing home.

Dad’s care home, according to their website is part of a nationwide chain of 59 properties. Curious, I asked the care team if this mandatory isolation rule had been rolled out across the entire group. By that point, the topic had become intensely political. All I got in response was a knowing smile. When I pressed further, asking whether, if this was recognized as best practice, it shouldn't have been mandatory everywhere, I got a simple shrug.

And FYI, the Department of Health conducted a full review of this nursing home group and why there was no Covid deaths in that Nursing home.