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 to hurried policies including “Eat Out to Help Out” and confused messages about returning to work if you could, even though few of us were able to because our offices were shut.
Perhaps the best analysis of the situation then came not from science journalists like me, or political pundits, but comedian Matt Lucas, who mocked Boris Johnson’s speech to the nation about coronavirus.
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Then, when scientific advice, far clearer and more considered than before, called for a short, sharp lockdown over school half term that autumn, it was rejected.
Then, as cases inevitably rose as winter set in, the confusing and disruptive “tier” system was introduced. A kind of lockdown light that didn’t really work.
This led in turn to a precipitous rise in cases, partly driven by the new “Kent” or Alpha variant, which the scientists had seen coming, and the need for another draconian lockdown in January 2021.
One insider described it to the inquiry as a “roller-coaster” response. One of chaotic, half-baked, half-measures that made more severe interventions necessary.
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Indecision cost the economy – and the mental health and well-being of the most vulnerable – far more than shorter, harder, earlier lockdowns would have done.
And ultimately, most damningly, it cost the most lives. The “second wave”, as it soon became known, between December 2020 and February 2021, killed 65,000 people. One analysis concluded 27,000 of those deaths might have been avoided, or at least delayed, had tougher action been taken.
It’s why, now that the pandemic is over, an analysis of the data shows how the UK saw some of the highest COVID mortality in the developed world.
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It’s reasonable to question the purpose of a lengthy, £200m inquiry, as many, including my colleagues, have.
Especially when you only have to look to lockdown parties and the spectacular falling out between Boris Johnson and key advisors, such as Dominic Cummings, to know there was chaos and bad decision-making at the heart of government.
Is it worth an extra £200m to know that as much evidence as possible has been dragged into the light – when you consider the failed “test and trace” programme alone cost taxpayers £35bn?
Surely it is worth it for the families of the 220,000 who died during the UK’s COVID pandemic.
