How best to summarise how badly the government fumbled the UK response to the COVID pandemic?
Baroness Heather Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, chose to highlight one truly damning statistic: 23,000.
That’s the number of deaths that might have been prevented if Boris Johnson had followed his peers in Italy, Spain and France by locking down the UK on 16 March 2020 rather than delaying for another week.
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But I would choose another – and to my mind, far greater – failure: when, six months later, those in charge failed to learn from that mistake, leading to a far greater loss of lives.
Back in March 2020, the government was forced to make it up as they went along.
Mr Johnson was, in the words of his advisers, “trolleying” – swerving erratically between doomsday thinking and the need to keep shaking hands and act like normal.
But the government’s scientific advisers, who were given an easy ride by Lady Hallett in her summary, were trolleying too.
The same scientists who were to urge the government to lock down had, weeks before, dismissed the idea as unworkable. Suggesting, not without reason (if we’d been dealing with a flu virus perhaps), “herd immunity” was the least bad outcome.
But by early summer of 2020, as Lady Hallett highlighted, we knew what we were dealing with.
We’d been through a lockdown, we knew people understood how to behave, and we knew which vulnerable groups needed the most support.
Yet instead of acting to slow the rising spread of the virus, chaos within government led…
