i'm profoundly sorry for each death that has occurred. raymond maby. marlene maby. trevor cook. i'm profoundly sorry for each death that has occurred. for some, it will be hard to take that apology from me. i understand that. i get it. scum! the covid pandemic shook the world. it wasn't just the deaths. it was the way they died. it was horrible. the inquiry looks back at the uk's response. there was a shared assumption that herd immunity was inevitably going to be the only way that you contained a virus because it spread like wildfire. we're living in an age _ which is going to have more frequent and more complex pandemics. politicians, civil servants, scientists and other experts are being questioned under oath. i swear by almighty god... sincerely and truly... declare and affirm... that the evidence i shall give... should be the truth... the whole truth... ..and nothing but the truth. coming up are the key things we learned from the first part of the inquiry that asks when covid hit, was the uk properly prepared? the inquiry is set to last for years, but is broken down into different sections. there are so many different ways to express different opinions. why do we have to have personal abuse? baroness hallett, a former high courtjudge, is chairing this inquiry. throughout, the questioning is led by senior counsel hugo keith kc. but if ijust may say, mr hancock, will you allow me, please, in this forum? it is vital for planning. that's the point. i ask the questions. of course. that crucialjob is shared by another senior barrister, kate blackwell kc. do you accept, mr cameron, that the health budgets over the time of your government were inadequate and led to a depletion in its ability to provide an adequate service? i don't accept that. a team of around 60 lawyers work directly for the inquiry. dozens of organisations are designated as core participants. now, that allows them to ask questions and make legal submissions. a fragmented system, which looks much more like a bowl of spaghetti than a clear and coordinated framework for a cogent national response. tensions are high at times, with family members and protesters often gathering outside when the most high profile witnesses appear. self—serving, arrogant. it was all about blaming other departments. i said we need to take this seriously, to my chief executive. "we're going to know people that die from this." but never thought for a minute it would be my dad and my sister five days apart. the inquiry�*s public hearing starts with a moving film from relatives. they had the bodies in bags. you couldn't even give them an outfit to bury your family in an outfit. they said they were in a zipped bag and it's got some lock on it and they're not allowed to break the lock. exasperated sigh i'm angry. i need questions answered. i'm just still hurt, and i'm still upset. and it's been a couple of years now and we're still upset. and it's not going to go away just like that. anyway, a couple of days after she did pass away. suddenly, i'm on my own. we were courting for... ..six years. and married for 48. and so this affected me greatly. i'm on my own now. many of the witnesses took a moment to recognise those who suffered the most because of the pandemic. i'm profoundly sorry for each death that has occurred, and i also understand why, for some, it will be hard to take that apology from me. i understand that, i get it. for families, the testimony is difficult to accept at times. i'm sorry, it was so insincere. it was like a pantomime. it was like he was play—acting. i wanted to take a brief opportunity to offer my sympathies _ and condolences to all those who have suffered as - a result of covid—19. the pandemic may be over, but for very many people, i that suffering continues to this day~ _ and there is not a day that passes that i don't think about that. - we should hang our heads in shame at the fact that we know that inequality... if you're a mother living in a high rise in a council estate, a single parent mother, then the impact of covid was much more than if you are living in the leafy suburbs. that's a fact, that's a reality. but unfortunately, when it came to pandemic planning, the scientists and the governments of this country, governments of this country did not prepare for that. family representatives are able to ask questions throughout the whole inquiry. when covid came, we were not as prepared as we could and should have been. and that does... yes, lead to additional pain for bereaved families. and do you accept that you had responsibility to plan for that? i yes, i'm a minister in the government, of course, it's my responsibility. our loved ones didi not stand a chance. we thought it was - going to be bad today. but the lack of preparation is just beyond our worst fears. - i'm going to get a bit emotional here, and emotion is good because i am here to remind everybody of the human cost that we paid as bereaved people. my mummy was not cannon fodder. my mummy was a wonderful woman who had the spirit of goliath. i think it's very notable korea did not have a lockdown in the first year of the pandemic. they avoided a lockdown at all. starting two decades before covid, sars and mers both caused by different forms of coronavirus, spread across parts of asia and the middle east. news: hong kong's airport is one of the busiest in the world. - a single infected airline passenger can carry a virus anywhere - in the world in a matter of hours. professor heymann played a key role in managing that first sars outbreak for the world health organization. what effect do you think having a serious outbreak of those two previous coronaviruses had on countries such as singapore, japan, south korea, taiwan and hong kong? i believe they had a profound effect on those countries. in fact, i visited some of those countries during the period after sars and before the current pandemic, and some of those countries had actually established isolation wards with hundreds of beds in their hospitals. so they were developing surge capacity in those countries at the same time as they were training their health workers in procedures such as contact tracing. so they appeared to be much better prepared because of what they had learned from the sars outbreaks. the uk and europe didn't see major outbreaks of sars and mers. former health secretary, jeremy hunt, suggests the uk failed to learn the lessons from asia, where fast quarantine and contact tracing then slowed down the spread of covid. this assumption that you can't stop the spread of the virus, i think that was deeply entrenched when covid arrived. we didn't look at countries like south korea and taiwan, which had a very different assumption about the effectiveness of quarantining. so there was a shared assumption that herd immunity was inevitably going to be the only way that you contained a virus because it spread like wildfire. the inquiry hears that preparations in the uk did not include plans for a national lockdown or the closing of schools and businesses for any serious length of time. from this evening, i must give the british people a very simple instruction — you must stay at home. kathryn hammond was the director of the cabinet office unit in charge of emergency planning in 2020. was there any consideration of full national lockdowns? i no, there wasn't, because the pandemic flu scenario didn't make that an effective tool. there was therefore a failure to think about in the way- that other countries, - particularly in the far east, had done, countermeasures such as... ..mandatory quarantines? yes — shielding. social restrictions. yes _ border controls. yes _ there was, as you say, - a complete lack of imagination. yes. i had to overrule the initial advice not to quarantine people being brought back from wuhan. i mean, it's madness. in his first appearance at the inquiry, sir chris whitty, england's chief medical officer and one of the most recognisable faces of the pandemic, is repeatedly asked to slow down for the stenographer taking notes. given the importance of the answer, i please keep it as slow as you can. i i apologise. the very big new idea was the idea of a lockdown. sir chris says it was almost impossible for scientists to plan for the idea of a national lockdown. it's a very radical thing to do. mandatory quarantine. really big thing. i would have thought it would be very surprising without this being requested by a senior politician or similar that a scientific committee would venture in between emergencies into that kind of extraordinarily major social intervention with huge economic and social ramifications. a question we hear throughout is whether planning in the uk focused on the wrong type of pandemic, one that couldn't be stopped or contained. the absolutely central problem with the planning in the uk was that the doctrine was wrong. the doctrine of the uk was to plan for the consequences of a disaster. can we buy enough body bags? where are we going to bury the dead? and that was completely wrong. but central to pandemic planning needs to be, how do you stop the disaster from happening in the first place? a lot of the uk's planning for a pandemic was based on a new strain of influenza. preparation documents looked at an outbreak of swine flu from 2009. we are taking the preparations that are necessary and the precautions to prevent the incidence of this disease in this country. much more time was spent on pandemic flu and the dangers of pandemic flu rather than on pandemic potential. pandemics of other more respiratory diseases like covid turned out to be. and, you know, ithink this is so important because so many consequences follow from that. others disagree that focusing just on flu was the major problem, including the health secretary at the start of the pandemic, matt hancock. of course, it would have been better to plan for a generic respiratory disease x, and that is what we should do in future. however, planning forflu did have some benefits, and it brings me back to my central contention that whilst this was an error, it was in no way the biggest error. dame sally davies was england's chief medical officer for nine years, leaving herjobjust months before covid reached the uk. there was groupthink, but it wasn'tjust us. this was the whole global north. the western world thought that flu was the thing to focus on. and let me be quite clear, we've had injust over a century fourflu pandemics, we will have more. it's only a question of when. so, for me, the issue is not should we not prepare for flu? we must prepare for flu. the question is, what else we do over and above that? i believe that if we prepared well for flu, we should be able to pivot pretty effectively, and we can't prepare for everything. some terms keep coming up throughout this inquiry. cygnus and alice were both government exercises to role play a possible future pandemic. the 2010 heine review looked back at the 2009 swine flu outbreak, and the lessons learnt from that and the 2011 preparedness plan was a big government strategy to look at a possible pandemic flu outbreak. but despite recommendations being made, after all these exercises and reports, the inquiry heard they weren't all implemented in full. |were you concerned by the fact thatj exercise cygnus itself had concluded that the uk's plans, - policies and capability for preparedness were not sufficient? it was very clear that there was a lot of work that the department needed to do to improve its readiness for a pandemic influenza. if the question you were asking was, was i concerned about that? yes, i was concerned about that. but i was also aware that by the time i started in my post in 2018, a programme of work had been established to address those concerns. in the decade before covid, the world health organization actually praised much of the uk's preparation and planning for a pandemic. the inquiry later heard that was simply wrong. at this hospital near cardiff, - one doctor reported nurses preparing for work with four visors between 40 of them. i do you agree that the ppe stockpile in wales was woefully inadequate to deal with the pandemic that was being planned for? yes. so our collective planning assumptions did not stand up against reality. we were going through ppe at a much faster rate than our planning assumptions assumed we would. so, actually, we found that our stockpile that should have lasted for a whole wave didn't. two experts in emergency operations were asked to write a report for the inquiry about the structures in place to better protect the uk from a pandemic. was preparedness for a novel infectious disease pandemic. adequate or inadequate? inadequate _ had the response strategy puti in place by the united kingdom government been adequately tested in advance of covid—19? _ in detail, forensic detail, to make sure that the plans worked on the ground, no. the inquiry also hears that some of the communication with central or national governments, both before and during covid, didn't always work brilliantly. sometimes we had no response or communication, and we found out at the same time as the rest of the population on the 5pm bulletin about the new guidance. there was no functioning government in northern ireland in the years just before covid and the inquiry heard that has an impact on pandemic planning. the westminster government is sovereign at all times and if there is a deficiency in the northern ireland administration, then those people in westminster with responsibility for northern ireland have a responsibility. and that's true whether it's in relation to female reproductive rights or indeed resilience and emergency planning. i would think that that was a gap that should have been dealt with at that time. i support the need for going to full preparation for no deal planning because it might happen, not because i want it to happen. politicians, in particular, are asked about brexit. the government had started a number of pieces of work into pandemic planning. some of those were put on hold because of concerns the uk could leave the eu without a trade agreement. so, you were aware and you agreed that a range of work relating - to planned flu and hci would have to be scaled back or paused? - yes, and i wasn't enthusiastic about it, but i signed it off. and the reason that i signed off the overall reshaping of the department is because we had a very real and material threat should a disorganised brexit happen. your department's work. was significantly interfered with by the diversion of resources to dealing with a no deal eu. - oh, yes. and i think we've been explicit about this, that this is one of the areas of work that we paused while we were looking very specifically at the consequences of a no deal brexit. i think every aspect of brexit has been false economy, if i can put it mildly. but that's another issue altogether. ms sturgeon, i'm so sorry. that is a witness - box, not a soapbox. we cannot allow the political debate of brexit to be ventilated here. - we were talking about availability of food in the shops and medicines for the national health service, so we had no choice but to do that planning. i deeply regret any implications that had for our emergency planning in other areas. i chaired my first cabinet, i think four days after becoming first minister, and almost the whole of our cabinet meeting is devoted to preparations for leaving the european union without a deal. the work done for a no deal brexit on supply chains for medicines was the difference between running out of medicines in the peak of the pandemic and not running out. we came extremely close, within hours, of running out of medicines for intensive care during the pandemic. it wasn't widely reported at the time. i think the only reason that we didn't run out is because of the work that steve 0ldfield and his team did, which they did during 2019 in preparation for a no deal brexit. questions were asked about the health system and whether it was in a strong enough condition just before covid hit. do you agree, mr osborne, . that by the time covid—19 hit, the consequences of austerity- were a depleted health and social care capacity and rising inequality in the united kingdom? - most certainly not. i would say if we had not done that, britain would have been more exposed not just to future things like the coronavirus pandemic, but indeed to the fiscal crises which very rapidly followed in countries across europe. do you agree that during your time l in office, the state of the social. care system became worse? i'm not sure i would accept that. i would certainly accept that there are rising pressures that including during my period in office on the social care system. they are driven by the fact britain has a rapidly ageing population. former prime minister david cameron also defends the government's policies in that decade before covid. so, we made the important decision to say that the health service was different, its budget would be protected and so there were real terms increases every year. and so, for instance, there were 10,000 more doctors working in the nhs at the end of the time i was prime minister than there were at the beginning. others criticised both the state of the health service and social care at that point when covid struck. we didn't have resilience either. and as i said earlier, you can't get a good outcome if you don't have resilience in the public's health, resilience in the public health system. it had been disinvested in. resilience in the nhs. and by comparative data compared to similar countries per per 100,000 population, we were at the bottom of the table on the number of doctors, number of nurses, number of beds, number of itus, number of respirators, ventilators. we needed resilience in social care, that was clearly missing. austerity has been so detrimental to all of our public services, not least the health service. austerity undermines our health department and other departments ability to be resilient when faced with adversity. and in this case, when faced with a pandemic. the work of those involved in the pandemic is also praised in the inquiry. sir chris whitty warns about the threats and abuse of scientists during covid, something he thinks could undermine our response in the future. what occurred during covid, where the level of abuse and in some cases threat to people who volunteered their time is an extremely concerning one. and one we should be very firm in saying that the society very much appreciates the work of these people who put in enormous amounts of time, usually at no recompense. i was astonished and sorry to hear about the abuse i of you and other colleagues. it's wrong for so many reasons. family members also speak about facing abuse. appallingly, you received a considerable amount, perhaps a vast amount of criticism of vitriolic attacks on social media. we've had people that have made media appearances talking about their loss, who have then been stalked via social media and abused, and in some cases threatened. and one of the things that i would like to point out is that had my dad died from something else, say, cancer, people wouldn't be coming to me and saying, "well, was it really cancer?" this inquiry is not, though, just a review of the past, but has to ask how to better protect the country in the future. professor woolhouse was and is a vocal critic of many blanket lockdown measures. 0n the scale of potential pandemics, covid—19 was not at the top. it may be that next time, and there will be a next time, we are dealing with a virus that is much more deadly and is also much more transmissible. in which case, actually, the things we did to control covid—19 wouldn't have worked anyway. i'm not sitting here as a doom monger or saying this is going to happen or this is going to happen soon. but i am confident enough to tell government that this is something you should be concerned about. the inquiry�*s next phase examines in detail the decisions made after covid hit the uk. many of those choices, though, were based on documents, exercises, and plans set out in the decade before 2020. it's clear now those plans were not up to scratch. lockdowns, for example, were not even considered. the whole system will need to improve if the uk is going to better prepare itself for the next pandemic that might come along. hello. rain has been a big feature of the weekend weather for many of us, but it wasn't a complete wash—out, there was a little bit of sunshine to be had. sunday afternoon brought some blue sky overhead for this weather watcher in cornwall. but on the earlier satellite picture, you can see this curl of cloud. an area of low pressure moving away, but this frontal system here left behind. it has been very, very wet again today across some parts of southern scotland, northern ireland, most especially northern england, and that rain will continue to push its way southwards through the night. 0nly moving quite slowly though into the midlands, wales, eventually the southwest of england, parts of east anglia. behind it, we get into a northerly wind, and that'll make for a rather chilly night across some parts of scotland, i think some places will get down to around 11—5 celsius. tomorrow then, here's our slow moving weather front — still only moving slowly southwards and eastwards, but behind it, we get into that northerly wind, bringing some unusually cool air for this point in july. so our weather front bringing clouds and outbreaks of rain across some eastern and southern counties of england first thing. it should pull away southwards, sunny spells and showers following on behind, and then, perhaps some more widespread showery rain into the far northwest of scotland, particularly the western isles, as we head through the afternoon. temperature—wise, pretty disappointing actually for this time of year — 14—19, maybe 20 celsius, that is below the average for late july. and then, as we head through tuesday, some spells of sunshine, a scattering of showers, not quite as breezy, but still rather cool with top temperatures between 15—20 celsius. now as we head on into wednesday, the day should start on a mainly fine note, albeit with 1—2 showers, but we'll see cloud rolling in from the west and eventually some outbreaks of rain moving in during the afternoon. the further east you are, a better chance of staying mostly dry, tnd those temperatures again in a range between 14—19, maybe 21 celsius in the brighter spots in eastern england. but through wednesday night, we see this next frontal system bringing another dose of rain — that should tend to clear during thursday to leave a mix of sunny spells and showers for the end of the week. but whichever way you slice it, it is an unsettled week ahead and, broadly speaking, a rather cool one for the time of year. live from london. this is bbc news thousands of people on the greek island of rhodes have been moved to safety, as wildfires burn out of control.

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