The Covid inquiry and 'learning lessons' from the pandemic

That next time, it will be different.

The UK Covid inquiry is expected to hear evidence from witnesses until at least 2026, but you can guarantee that when its chair, Baroness Hallett, issues her final report - perhaps a decade from now - the government of the day will trot out that well-worn pledge.

READ MORE: What did we learn from Nicola Sturgeon's first day at the UK Covid inquiry? 

The problem is that there will be no iron-clad requirement to act on any of the findings, whatever they happen to be.

Baroness Hallett has the power to compel witnesses to give testimony under oath and to produce evidence, albeit that legal wrangles continue over whether that includes the full panoply of unredacted Whatsapp messages from government ministers and officials.

Yet, at the end of it all, ministers are perfectly free to ignore or rubbish the inquiry's recommendations.

It begs the question what the real point or purpose of a public inquiry is, and whether it is really necessary in order to ready ourselves to respond more quickly and effectively to the next inevitable pandemic.

The UK is fairly unusual in even bothering with something as weighty and time-consuming as a judicial public inquiry.

If not "lessons" actually being learned and implemented, then, perhaps the best we can hope for is more clarity on exactly what happened and why?

The UK and the US have had much higher excess death rates than countries such as Germany, Sweden and Australia (Image: Our World in Data)

That it is an opportunity to examine in forensic detail the decisions taken, the mistakes made, and the arguments for and against controversial measures such as lockdown.

Baroness Hallett herself has described her job as being to examine "harm and loss in its broadest sense, and see whether some of it was inevitable and some of it could have been avoided".

In a pandemic, every action taken will harm someone so the goal must be to do the least harm to the most people.

READ MORE: What's really going on behind the Scotland-England waiting list divide?

But the definition of harm itself is wide-ranging, from limiting excess deaths to safeguarding children's rights to education and protecting people's livelihoods.

The inquiry will hear, as it should, from all sides: from families whose loved ones died alone in care homes and the businesses which went under; from frontline NHS workers and the ministers in charge of health and social care; from charities representing those still floored by long Covid, to those concerned by missed cancer diagnoses or supporting patients left in pain and disability as elective procedures were repeatedly paused.

There will be a chance to air the views of scientists with differing perspectives on whether the UK went too far or not far enough, on what more could have been done and what should never have been done.

Repeatedly we heard the phrase that ministers were "following the science", but that was little more than an attempt to pass the buck for unpopular decisions where there were never any clear-cut answers - only a balance of risks.

Giving evidence on Thursday, the WHO's chief scientist Sir Jeremy Farrar, a former member of the UK government's SAGE expert advisory group who stepped down in 2021, suggested that a "mirror group" of scientists should be embedded into proceedings in future with a specific remit to scrutinise and challenge the advice being put to ministers.

This, he suggested, could help to avoid the more "confrontational" situation that sprung up during the pandemic between the official SAGE and a self-styled "independent SAGE" - a self-appointed group of scientists who frequently criticised the official strategy, typically describing it as too lax.

There were other splinter groups though - such as the scientists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration - who backed herd immunity and "protecting the vulnerable" instead.

It is difficult to envision how any public inquiry could ever come up with a magic formula that balances out all the competing harms and at the same time satisfies all the dissenting voices.

We cannot forget that the virus which caused Covid was a tricky beast: it could spread from infected people before they were even showing any symptoms, and disproportionately sickened elderly people and those with underlying conditions including diabetes, COPD or obesity.

That made it both difficult to contain and inherently divisive.

Nicola Sturgeon arriving at the UK Covid inquiry in London on Thursday July 29 (Image: PA)

READ MORE: Devi Sridhar - 'Yes, there are lockdown lessons from Sweden' 

It is impossible to know what shape a future pandemic will take and how applicable the countermeasures adopted for Covid would be.

A recurring theme of the first two weeks of the inquiry was how wrong-footed the UK was by pandemic plans which were almost entirely geared to flu where containment strategies involving contact tracing, diagnostic testing, and quarantining were not expected to have much utility.

Nonetheless, it is clear that the UK could have fared much better.

We suffered both steeper drops in GDP and higher spikes in excess deaths (from all causes) than comparable countries.

Throughout 2020 and 2021, Australia was recording fewer deaths than it had pre-pandemic, but that came at the cost of closed borders which stranded thousands of Australians overseas.

It limited the spread of Covid until vaccines arrived, but even still its health service did not escape disruption as beds were ring-fenced as a precaution in case of outbreaks and other planned care was put on hold.

The UK economy was hit worse than other G7 countries in the first year of the pandemic (Image: ONS)

Meanwhile, Sweden, where social distancing was followed largely voluntarily and schools remained mostly open, is only really a template for the UK if we also take account of factors including its much better levels of population health and higher trust in government.

In contrast, the Uk's austerity years leading up to the pandemic were characterised by widening health inequalities, cuts to public health spending, and bitter political infighting over Brexit.

David Cameron and George Osborne may insist that they got the public finances into better shape to respond to the crisis, but it is also true that the poorest were hit hardest - both physically and economically - when it came.

Just as well that "lessons will be learned", then.