The UK Covid inquiry finally got underway in June this year, in what is expected to be one of the longest and most expensive public inquiries ever held.
More than three years on from the first lockdown, its chair, Baroness Heather Hallett, has pledged to "determine whether the level of loss - in the broadest sense of the word - was inevitable or whether things could have been done better".
Its Scottish counterpart, which began hearing evidence in October, is initially focused on the impact of the pandemic on ordinary people - from bereaved relatives to health and care workers.
Both are ultimately tasked with unravelling what happened, why, and providing lessons for the future - so what have we learned so far?
Legacy of austerity
Former Prime Minister David Cameron and his ex-Chancellor George Osborne insisted that austerity in the decade prior to Covid enabled the UK to spend £400 billion on its pandemic response, from furlough to vaccines.
Other witnesses argued that the UK might have avoided costly and prolonged lockdowns with early border closures and better pandemic preparedness (PPE stockpiles had been run down since 2009 and there was no test-and-trace infrastructure ready to go).
Public health experts Professor Sir Michael Marmot and Professor Clare Bambra submitted written testimony arguing that the UK was disadvantaged by austerity because it "entered the pandemic with its public services depleted, health improvements stalled, health inequalities increased and health among the poorest people in a state of decline".
Compared to similar wealthy nations, the UK was "at the bottom of the table on number of doctors, number of nurses, number of beds, number of ITUs, number of respirators, ventilators".
Flu planning
Multiple witnesses conceded that pandemic planning across the UK was geared towards influenza.
Giving evidence in June, Scotland's former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon admitted that a 2011 strategy provided "no set plan" for a non-flu outbreak.
Professor Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer advising the UK Government, told the inquiry that "we did not give sufficient thought to what we could do to stop in its tracks a pandemic on the scale of Covid".
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the government had been wrong-footed in its initial response to Covid because policymakers were influenced by what they "had seen and observed in their lifetimes".
He said: "What the system did remember were things like SARS and MERS and swine flu that had an impact on Asia but were relatively if not wholly benign in the UK - that was the default mindset."
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Why didn't we act sooner?
As early as January and February 2020, countries such as South Korea were suppressing the spread of Covid through testing, contact tracing and quarantining, without the need to resort to lockdown.
The UK response appears to have been hampered by a lack of testing infrastructure and an assumption that the virus could not be halted.
Dominic Cummings, the controversial former chief of staff at Number 10, told the inquiry that the government had been advised that closing borders would "only delay things by a relatively trivial amount", adding: "If you're going for a single-wave 'herd immunity by September' fundamental strategy, then faffing around at the borders wasn't regarded as relevant or coherent."
Prof Sir Chris Whitty insisted in his evidence that herd immunity was never government policy, but messaging had become confused by "communications errors".
Boris Johnson told the inquiry that it was the "prevailing view" among his medical and scientific advisors that imposing restrictions too soon could result in "behavioural fatigue".
Mr Johnson also insisted that the "panic level would have been much higher" earlier if the government had been aware that Covid could spread asymptomatically, adding: "The information that I was getting right up to the middle of March was that you were unlikely to have Covid unless you had symptoms."
Other witnesses say it was clear much earlier that asymptomatic transmission was a problem.
Lockdown
Former Chancellor George Osborne told the inquiry that "the truth is we didn't plan for a lockdown, no Treasury did before me or after me and no treasuries [did] in the western world".
Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University who sat on the UK Government's Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M-O) told the inquiry that the resort to national lockdowns was a "failure" of public health policy.
“The question of how to avoid lockdown was never asked of us and I find that extraordinary,” he said.
Prof Woolhouse said there had been "a worrying lack of urgency and appreciation of the scale of the imminent crisis between mid-January and early March 2020" which made the first lockdown "difficult to avoid".
However, he added that "there was ample time to put in place alternative interventions to social distancing that would have allowed us to avoid the second and third lockdowns”.
The WhatsApp row
Likened by High Court judges to "a conversation with an adviser in a corridor", the content of WhatsApp exchanges have at times provided an extraordinary insight into government turmoil.
Dominic Cummings was seen to describe Health Secretary Matt Hancock as "a proven liar who nobody believes" and told colleagues he was "exhausted" by Mr Johnson, who he complained on March 19 was "back to Jaws mode" - a reference to the mayor who wanted to keep the beaches open in the famous film despite shark attacks.
Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, described Mr Johnson's wife Carrie as "the real person in charge" and decried the government's pandemic response as a "terrible, tragic joke".
Little wonder that UK ministers went to court in a (failed) bid to avoid being forced to hand over unredacted WhatsApp messages to Baroness Hallett.
Nevertheless, thousands of messages have gone missing.
Around 5000 messages sent from Boris Johnson's phone between February and June 2020 vanished, with technical experts unable to retrieve them. The former PM said they had not been "backed up".
Current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak failed to provide any of his WhatsApp messages from his time as Chancellor during the pandemic, telling the inquiry he had "changed my phone multiple time over the past few years, and as that has happened the messages have not come across".
Meanwhile, the Scottish Government was engulfed in criticism over its failure to comply with requests for WhatsApp messages, with counsel to the inquiry Jamie Dawson KC saying that "very few messages appear to have been retained" from 137 groups.
The Scottish Government subsequently handed over 14,000 messages, but controversy has continued over auto-delete policies. Nicola Sturgeon has insisted that she was "not a member of any WhatsApp groups".
Flashpoints
Helen MacNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary in Number 10, provided some of the most excruciating testimony.
She described how Health Secretary Matt Hancock mimed being a cricket batter to demonstrate his confidence in handling the crisis, telling her "they bowl them at me, I knock them away".
However, Ms MacNamara said doubts were circulating about Mr Hancock's abilities in April 2020 because there was a "pattern of being reassured that something was absolutely fine and then discovering it was very, very far from fine".
She added that there was "not one single day" when Covid rules were fully followed in Downing Street
Sir Patrick Vallance's diary "brain dumps" have also been explosive.
The former scientific adviser said Boris Johnson was "obsessed with older people accepting their fate".
Mr Johnson insisted he had a duty to play Devil's advocate by interrogating advice.
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The Human Cost
The Scottish inquiry has highlighted the heartbreaking cost of Covid and the measures imposed to curtail it.
Witnesses have described feeling "haunted" by the trauma of loved ones dying alone in hospital or being unable to get life-saving emergency care due to Covid precautions, while others spoke of their grief after relatives with dementia became cut off and confused as care home visiting was banned.
The devastating impact of long Covid on children and cases of young people with autism becoming suicidal as routine and face-to-face services disappeared have also been highlighted.
What next?
The UK Covid inquiry will move north in the new year for a series of hearings in Edinburgh from January 16 until February 1 2024 which will be focused on pandemic decision-making by the Scottish Government.
Key witnesses are expected to include Nicola Sturgeon, former Health Secretary Jeane Freeman, and Scotland's national clinical director Jason Leitch
The Scottish Covid inquiry will continue with its impact hearings on health and social care.
Much of next year's sessions will also focus on the impact on young people in education and businesses.
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