It feels as though a collective amnesia has set in around Covid-19. We all just want to move forward and pretend it didn’t happen. But, as the saying goes, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

On 20 April 2020 I tweeted, “At what point will the British public realise what has happened over the past 9 weeks?” On Thursday, the Covid inquiry published its module 2 report on the political response to the pandemic. The answer finally to my tweet, more than five years later.

Already back then it seemed that the UK government (through its late and chaotic response) had taken the worst path, leading to tens of thousands of deaths and a draconian lockdown. The inquiry report states clearly what many could see at the time. Had it followed a containment path similar to the best performing countries, such as South Korea, Denmark, Norway and New Zealand, England could have avoided multiple lockdowns and arguably the majority of deaths in 2020. From January 2020, other countries were showing the way through early action and strong public health systems based on test, trace and isolation.

The report confirms that we had a distracted and absent prime minister in Boris Johnson, badly advised and working within a dysfunctional No 10. Not surprising, then, that devolved administrations didn’t trust the prime minister. In defiance of logic, we were all told to stay at home and not to travel beyond a certain distance, while airports remained open with no checks on passengers coming........

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