Britain broke the law by moving hospital patients to nursing homes early in the pandemic, a court rules.

The British authorities’s resolution within the spring of 2020 to discharge hospital sufferers into nursing houses with out testing them for the coronavirus was unlawful, a British court docket dominated on Wednesday, weighing in on what has turn into a defining scandal for Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Throughout the first wave of the pandemic in Britain, when widespread testing was not but obtainable, the federal government ordered that hundreds of older hospital sufferers — a few of whom had been contaminated with the virus — be despatched again to nursing houses in an effort to forestall a flood of virus instances from overwhelming Nationwide Well being Service hospitals.

With protecting gear in brief provide and the virus spreading asymptomatically, the early levels of the pandemic devastated Britain’s nursing houses, a deadly sample additionally seen throughout Europe and in the US.

In its judgment on Wednesday, the Excessive Court docket in London mentioned that coverage choices made by Matt Hancock, Britain’s well being secretary on the time, in March and April 2020 had been illegal and “did not have in mind the danger to aged and weak residents from nonsymptomatic transmission.”

About 20,000 nursing dwelling residents in England and Wales died from Covid-related causes between March and June 2020, based on official authorities information.

A spokesman for Mr. Hancock mentioned on Wednesday that the court docket discovered Mr. Hancock to have “acted fairly on all counts,” and added that Public Well being England — a authorities well being company that has since been changed by two others — failed to offer ministers the most recent details about asymptomatic transmission.

The court docket’s ruling got here in a lawsuit introduced in opposition to Mr. Hancock and Public Well being England by two ladies whose fathers died in nursing houses in 2020.

Mr. Johnson’s authorities has been criticized for a collection of pandemic-related missteps. In October, a parliamentary inquiry discovered that the federal government’s preliminary response “ranks as probably the most necessary public well being failures the UK has ever skilled,” resulting in what it mentioned had been hundreds of avoidable deaths.

Charlie Williams, a spokesman for Covid-19 Bereaved Households for Justice, an advocacy group in Britain, mentioned his household had assumed his father could be secure from the virus in a nursing dwelling. His father died within the dwelling in April 2020.

“We now have to see these accountable for these darkish days held accountable, and classes discovered to avoid wasting lives, guaranteeing the grim scenes of spring 2020 are by no means repeated once more,” he mentioned in a Twitter statement.