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.

“That just highlights that there was no support and that we were abandoned as a sector during that first wave,” he argued.

Mr Monaghan’s comments came amid the fallout from Dominic Cummings’s monumental dump on his former boss and colleagues, in which the spurned chief adviser to Boris Johnson accused Mr Hancock of lying over the testing of elderly patients discharged into social care, a charge that the Health Secretary denies.

Mr Cummings described as “complete nonsense” the claim that the government had put a protective ring around care homes.

There was no requirement to test patients being discharged from hospital into a care home until April 15 2020.

Guidance in place until March 13 said that community transmission was so low, it was “very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected.”

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng was among Mr Hancock’s Cabinet colleagues who attempted to ride to the rescue today, stressing how “difficult” the Health Secretary’s job had been and how “hard” he had worked.

But fellow Tory Dan Poulter, vice-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus, broke ranks, saying: “There is a strong case for conducting an immediate inquiry into Covid-related deaths in care homes.”

Further pressure on Mr Hancock came from an official report that, for the first time, acknowledged the role played by the discharge of untested patients into care homes.

Reportedly written several months ago, the Public Health England study, which was placed without announcement on the government’s website on Thursday, linked 97 care home outbreaks and the deaths of 286 people to hospital discharges.

It concluded: “Whilst our analysis identified relatively small numbers of outbreaks potentially seeded from hospital-acquired infections, the potential for their preventability and the ensuing impact on the care homes, their residents, families and staff must be fully acknowledged.”