Was there a 'right way' to handle pandemic?

Read Philip’s column every week in the Western Morning News

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AFTER the end of the Second World War, the majority of the combatants and most of the civilians who had endured five years of anxiety, misery and loss went back to their prewar lives and tried to forget what had just happened.

Postwar historians tell us that it took years for any kind of meaningful appreciation of the bravery on the battlefield and the stoicism on the home front to kick in.

For more than a decade, no one really wanted to dwell on the horror of what the world had been through.

The coronavirus pandemic cannot be compared to world war. But something of the same reluctance to examine too closely what we went through during those often dark days in 2020 and 2021 was apparent in the following few years. It was grim, it ended, move on.

Of course those who lost loved ones remember them and feel deeply the pain of their passing. But in general the resumption of ordinary life, post-pandemic, has been the priority, not endless navel-gazing.

It has, however, been the job of some people to analyse in depth and at length the way the authorities handled the crisis, and last week Baroness Hallett, who chaired the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, produced her second report. A third comes out next spring.

At more than 700 pages, there is a lot of detail to be digested. But the headlines have been reported and, in brief, they suggest the Government was too slow to react and by delaying the first lockdown condemned some 23,000 people to death who might otherwise have survived the pandemic.