Well, I could have done better and I said so at the time.
It didn’t take an expert to realise that people, like my brother-in-law, were dying from something that was, at that stage, not understood, highly infectious and out of control, but it did require someone with brains in overall charge of the response - unfortunately all we had was BJ, besotted with Carrie, and a bunch of incompetent cronies making it up on the fly … 
Professor Steven Riley, who worked for Imperial College London at the time of the pandemic, told the UK COVID-19 Inquiry, in his witness statement, that the government should have called the lockdown on 9 March 2020 instead of 23 March.
Prof Riley, who now works for the UK Health Security Agency, said subsequent data had shown that people began to change their behaviour on or around 16 March, a few days before the public was ordered to stay at home.
Asked to elaborate, he told the inquiry: “Once we had lab-confirmed deaths in ICUs [intensive care units] with no travel history, no obvious connections to any out of country social networks (1), even a handful of those would indicate that we would be rapidly progressing in our epidemic.”
(1) Like my brother-in-law
AFAIK, Donkeyman was first to raise a thread about the danger of the then scarcely-known virus:
20 Jan '20 20:10
It ended up with over 5,000 posts.
I think that might just be missing the entire point here. The experts were giving expert advice before and during the pandemic. The government did not heed that advice.
This ruddy probing IMO is a waste of money when there are SO MANY homeless and others housed in completely inappropriate almost derelict old buildings. When are we going to get a government people-centric and not self-centred nest feathers 
Quite … 
Amid criticism that it was too slow to act, the Government now faces claims that Britain was in a poor state of readiness, calls to order protective gear were ignored and its own scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears.
The Prime Minister is said to have missed the first meeting on January 24, which lasted an hour, and then four more as the virus became a massive threat to the UK.
Mr Johnson attended his first Cobra meeting about the new strain of coronavirus on March 2 - five weeks after the first one - as the UK had about three dozen confirmed cases.
For some of the time BJ was busy with other matters:
Boris Johnson spent nearly two weeks out of the public eye, staying at a taxpayer-funded country mansion with his girlfriend as ministers held emergency meetings on the coronavirus crisis.
As the nation faced the twin crises of flooding caused by Storm Dennis and the rapidly escalating Covid-19 outbreak, the Prime Minister was staying at Chevening, a 115 room lakeside mansion set in 3,500 acres in the Kent countryside.
The Grade-I listed, 17th century mansion is traditionally the country residence of the Foreign Secretary. But the PM stayed there because renovations were being performed on his own grace-and-favour mansion, Chequers.
After chairing the first meeting of his newly reshuffled cabinet on Friday, February 14, he decamped to Chevening with partner Carrie Symonds.
The UK had already raised the threat level of the virus from low to moderate two weeks earlier, after the first two cases were confirmed on British soil - a pair of Chinese nationals who fell ill at a hotel in York.
NHS England had already declared its first “level 4 critical incident” at the end of January.
And there are still many in the Tory party who think he is the best PM since Thatcher and would have him back in No 10 immediately if they could.
Hi
Boris does not do detail, at all, his brain is not wired that way.
He also hates taking decisions.
Very true. He does neither detail nor decision. Nor truth. He does do bombast very well.
That’s what this country needs - more bombast.
Sorry to hear about your BiL Omah…
When was it that Prime Ministers had a clue how the common people live? They are all cut from the same Eton/Oxbridge cloth and are money and power orientated. I bet none of them, past and present, could wire up a simple three pin plug…
I agree that at the first sign of the pandemic we should have lifted the drawbridge and stopped all forms of transport into the UK. I still think that all airports should be closed forever.
Flights now…
How can you possibly consider any forms of pollution control until this has been addressed…
He also hates spending his own money - if he can get something for free then he will, otherwise he will find a “supporter” to pay the bill … of course, he is not averse to rewarding those supporters with positions, titles and government contacts … 
Truth - he doesn’t know the meaning of truth:
The government’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme had been running that summer of 2020. At the time, there was fierce debate about the need for social-distancing measures to control the virus.
On Sunday 20 September 2020, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson called a Zoom meeting of scientists to discuss the government’s response to sharply rising Covid infections.
Dame Angela, then chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, who co-chaired the influential SPI-M modelling group during the pandemic, was one of the attendees, along with her colleague Prof John Edmunds, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
Then Chancellor Rishi Sunak also dialled in, along with senior Downing Street officials including Dominic Cummings, the government’s chief medical adviser, Prof Chris Whitty, and the then chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance.
And on Thursday, the Covid inquiry was shown a private WhatsApp exchange between Dame Angela and Prof Edmunds, sent at the time of the meeting, which refers to Rishi Sunak as "Dr Death, the Chancellor".
Prof Edmunds told the inquiry he was unable recall if that had been a specific reference to the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which had subsidised food in pubs, restaurants and other hospitality venues over the summer, while Covid cases had been low.
But in earlier testimony to the inquiry, he said he was “still angry” about the policy. “It was one thing to take your foot off the brake - but another to put your foot on the accelerator,” he told the inquiry.
Prof Edmunds told the inquiry 45,000 people had just died - and while the pub and restaurant sector needed support, the government could have just given them money.
“This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk,” he added.
The Downing Street meeting had also involved scientists from what Sir Patrick described in an email as the “let it rip” brigade. That included Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, and his colleague Prof Sunetra Gupta - both of whom were critics of several lockdown-related measures.
And in her WhatsApp exchange, Dame Angela uses an expletive to refer to an individual - thought to be Prof Heneghan - and his evidence, to which Prof Edmunds replies: “Every statistic is wrong.”
Well, whatever Dame Angela said, I’m sure that it suited the individual and I’m delighted that she so harshly judged the incompetent yet deadly Sunak … 
Simon Case, who has been cabinet secretary since 2020, is expected to return to work in a few weeks. The absence comes as the government grapples with challenges at home and abroad, ahead of a general election expected next year.
Mr Case was appointed to his role when Boris Johnson was prime minister and has been embroiled in a string of controversies, including the Partygate scandal, during his time in post. His name has also come up in reports about the inquiry into bullying allegations against former Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, and the arrangement of an £800,000 credit facility to Mr Johnson.
And last week, WhatsApp messages in which he complained about the influence of Mr Johnson’s wife, Carrie Johnson, were released by the Covid-19 inquiry, which was expected to hear Mr Case give evidence in the coming weeks.
A Cambridge graduate with a PhD in political history, Mr Case ascended through the ranks of the civil service after joining in 2006. He held roles in the UK’s intelligence agency, GCHQ, and in the Royal Household on the way to the job top. At the age of 41, Ms Case became the youngest cabinet secretary in recent times.
Given his relative lack of experience, his appointment surprised senior civil servants and was seen by critics as a political move by Mr Johnson, the then-prime minister.
The inquiry will, presumably, continue.
I saw the evidence given by Prof Edmunds about the second wave and the advice given to government. Specifically advice given to Johnson. The advice was lockdown for a second time but do it early. The aim was to get control of Covid early or wait for the cases to rise and thus let Covid get control. Which would force a lockdown anyway. And more deaths, and a more exhausted NHS. Guess what Johnson did?
Obviously, Johnson heeded the advice and went for the hard, fast lockdown thus saving millions of lives … 
Actually, BJ and Dr Death first opened up pubs, restaurants (Eat Out to Help Out) and hairdressers then later theatres, bowling alleys and soft play areas, thus setting off the second wave of the pandemic … 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/health-67243378/page/2
Today’s session of the Covid inquiry is starting, with some initial remarks from Baroness Hallett.
Martin Reynolds has just been sworn in as the day’s first witness. He was the principal private secretary to Boris Johnson - who was then prime minister - from 2019 until he resigned in February 2022. He was caught up in the Partygate scandal when it emerged he had written an email inviting around 200 colleagues to “socially-distanced drinks” during the first lockdown.
He was named 24 times in Sue Gray’s report into the events, attending some of the gatherings himself while helping to organise two of them, and earning him the nickname ‘Party Marty’.
He quit his Downing Street role in February 2022 in the aftermath of the scandal and was given an Order of the Bath award for public service in Johnson’s resignation honours list.
Public service, my R’s …
Martin Reynolds is asked about the policy for keeping private messages on Whatsapp and email accounts for Downing Street. He says in this period, meaning early 2020, the use of Whatsapp became more extensive. However, he says decisions were “taking place in the normal way”, and not over Whatsapp. These are exchanges which people “could have been doing previously in phone calls and in corridors”.
“You’re not suggesting are you that the vast majority of these Covid related WhatsApps are irrelevant?” Hugo Keith KC asks.
Martin Reynolds was then asked about a group called ‘PM Updates’ which appeared to be mainly used for exchanging official information between the Prime Minister and senior civil servants.
By March and April 2021 there were growing calls for a Covid public inquiry; it was officially announced by Boris Johnson in May that year. On 15 April the inquiry heard that Reynolds turned on the disappearing messages function on a group named PM Updates - meaning that all new messages would disappear from the group seven days after they were sent.
Asked about this in the inquiry, he said he “could not recall” exactly why he turned on the function. He said it “could have been” that he was worried about someone screen-grabbing the exchanges and leaking them to the press.
Of course not. Nothing to do with the likely inquiry, nothing to do with all the incriminating messages, nothing to do with panicking.
The inquiry has heard from Martin Reynolds, the ex-senior aide for former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Let’s get you up to speed on what’s been said so far:
