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It was when the army came to see Anne Copeland that the scale of the situation really hit home. In the beginning, the conversation was about turning empty buildings into care homes for people going in and out of hospital, to avoid the transmission of the coronavirus. By the end it had covered turning ice rinks into morgues and the shortage of refrigerated lorries to move bodies.
“You were having conversations that would have been unthinkable at Christmas,” Copeland, the head of specialist funds at Kames Capital, said of discussions she held with army officers and a local authority she prefers not to name, which happened around the end of March and beginning of April.
“Nothing was off the table in terms of how to deal with the situation. It was blind panic.”
Other real estate sectors have had their operations affected by the coronavirus pandemic, but nothing like care homes and senior living. The sector deals every day with things society would prefer not to think about: ageing, death, dementia, disease, incontinence. But during the coronavirus crisis, it has been challenged like never before.
Those in the sector are angry about the way the spread of COVID-19 in care homes was managed by the authorities. Sources told Bisnow the chaos about how to handle the pandemic led to situations where operators and their landlord partners felt like they were being forced to choose who lived and died.…
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