Chief medical officer for Wales Sir Frank Atherton has explained why there was a deliberate policy to discharge untested patients into care home during the pandemic.

Giving evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry yesterday, Atherton said that in April 2020, the Welsh government had become “very anxious” about hospitals “filling up and falling over” in Italy and wanted to avoid the situation arising in Wales and in the UK.

Atherton said the decision to discharge untested patients to care homes had not been easy but the “common view was that care homes ought to be able to manage cases of infectious disease by isolating people within there”.

The chief medical officer added: “Now, these were difficult choices, but they were not easy choices, and the alternative of keeping everybody from a care home in a hospital setting would have led to negative consequences in a different direction.”

In later evidence, chief scientific officer to Wales, Dr Robert Orford, explained that testing had been introduced two weeks later in Wales than in England due to a lack of capacity.

The Inquiry heard last week there was a policy among government ministers to use disappearing WhatsApp messages.

Speaking to the Inquiry yesterday, Dame Shan Morgan, the permanent secretary in Wales at the time of the pandemic, admitted to have “deleted a few early messages” but said she could not remember why she had done this.