Editorial: The UK C​ovid inquiry is a vital investigation into a key area of policy decisions

​The much anticipated UK Covid inquiry has been getting under way in London. The investigation will be hugely important. The response to coronavirus is one of the biggest political and health policy decisions taken since the NHS was established 75 years ago. The UK like most countries around the world went into a lockdown that had profound effects on society that are not even close to being fully understood.

Almost everyone who took a dogmatic position for or anti such an approach has been to some extent challenged by piecemeal pieces of evidence that emerged during the lockdowns and since them. But there is nonetheless some compelling evidence that confining people to their homes for such long periods of time caused as much harm as it prevented. The average age of people who died from or with Covid was roughly as old as the average age of death in a normal person, yet people of all ages had their lives turned upside down – in many cases with disastrous consequences for mental health and livelihoods and families and education. In most respects though politicians were trying their best and acting on an entirely understandable precautionary principle.

There are other issues that will need to be comprehensively examined such as the government’s handling of the need to source personal protection equipment and its overseeing of valuable Covid related contracts.

Therefore it is entirely appropriate that the inquiry will take more than a year. Campaigners in Wales and Northern Ireland are troubled at only getting three weeks each focused on that. The main questions arising from the Covid response need to be answered at a national level yet there are undoubtedly local issues that will not get properly examined in a three-week time frame.