How care homes paid the price for Covid as ministers scrambled to save the NHS at any cost With all eyes on hospitals, and resources elsewhere the death toll was left to rise among the UK's most vulnerable, say campaigners 17 March 2021 • 8:00pm For the managers of England’s 15,500 care homes, the official assessment of the risk from coronavirus was deceptively reassuring. It was “very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected”, Public Health England said on Feb 25 last year. Of all the statements issued by government bodies over the course of the pandemic, it was arguably the most ill-judged, and almost certainly the most mistaken.