Elderly people are being left to die in Britain’s nursing homes instead of being offered care in hospitals, said a priest and former surgeon.Fr Patrick Pullicino volunteered to return to the U.K. National Health Service to work as a consultant at Nightingale Hospital in London. The hospital was one of seven to be built in just 10 days, providing 4,000 of 11,000 new beds for patients requiring emergency treatment for COVID-19.

But just 51 patients have been treated there in three weeks, with thousands of surplus beds in many other NHS hospitals even as the coronavirus passes its peak.

Pullicino, who served as chairman of the Department of Neurology and Neurosciences at the New Jersey Medical School in 2001 before returning to the U.K. in 2005, told Catholic News Service April 25 that the excess beds can be explained by a policy of returning elderly patients from hospitals to care homes even if they have COVID-19.

“If somebody in a nursing home gets COVID, you don’t leave them there. You have to monitor them, and if they get to a certain point you bring them into hospital. You don’t leave them to die with hypoxia and pneumonia and put them on palliative care in a nursing home,” he said. “That’s not the way to deal with it, but that is what they are doing.”