DISCHARGING hospital patients into care homes without testing them for Covid-19 was likened today to “putting live explosives into a tinder box.”

As Tory ministers tried to throw a protective shield around under-fire Health Secretary Matt Hancock, the boss of Britain’s biggest charitable social care provider said that care home residents “were seen as somehow an inevitable casualty.”

Methodist Homes chief executive Sam Monaghan said that half of the 40,000 people who died in the first wave of coronavirus had been care home residents.