Every single resident in the home I worked in had a DNAR applied, and everything was put in place to avoid admission to hospital, however in order for people to die of anything peacefully and pain/distress free, medical intervention is needed for the administration of drugs.
We had an admission from hospital, they brought it in, with the lack of suitable PPE and even at one point, bloody soap to wash your hands with, in a place designed to encourage people to mix, of course it went through like a freight train. It was inevitable.
Those people still needed the intervention of Drs to prescribe and nurses to administer the drugs needed to die pain and distress free. All too often that intervention was too late because of the immense strain the services were under at the time, and let me be clear, I don't blame those services, it was the result of what was happening.
I've just counted 20 homes or units that I know of in a 10 mile radius that looks after vulnerable people.
More people dying of it without the lockdowns and measures to slow the spread, even if they would have died anyway of something else, would have meant more people in that situation in a very short space of time, more pressure on the services that were already stretched beyond capacity.
Whatever course of action were taken, the outcome was never going to be a good one. No amount of management was going to stop an illness that's rampaging through the population in its tracks, we couldn't suddenly magic up more medical staff and capacity to deal with the illnesses that were nothing to do with covid and covid simultaneously. I mean they had a go, calling people back from retirement, opening the Nightingale hospitals, shutting some departments and turning them into covid wards or temporary ICU's, but the NHS was never designed to treat so many extra people at such short notice, whatever was done, it was always going to have a negative impact.