Carl Hennigan

We hear a lot about them, 140,000 hospital beds.

But just think about below the margin of the water.

where all the problem is.

There are 400,000 people living in care homes.

There are nearly 4 million people who live alone in this country who are over the age of 65.

And that's what suddenly people are waking up to.

Now, the problem I have in all of this is we have totally forgotten about them.

And in nursing home particularly, what we're talking about is just not practical under the current structures.

In my urgent care job, I go into nursing homes all the time.

It's about half of the work I do.

The density of the way some homes are structured means it's impossible to stop the spread.

They're too tightly packed in.

The resources, the number of people who work there is too small.

In fact, what I would have done in this outbreak is not built the Excel Centre and the 19 Gale Hospital.

I would have got the army to go to nursing homes and go the other way around because particularly that's where all of the impact is needed.

Most of the deaths, more than half the deaths, are in the over 75-year-olds.

And they're the most at risk.

But we've totally forgotten about them.

And we're just waking up when we've realized the tsunami is happening.

You get one infection in a nursing home.