We knew full well that the bodies were going to pile high around us

"It's frightfully easy to come up with an inquiry after the event, looking back with hindsight," opined Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Conservative MP and chair of the public accounts committee, on Times Radio last week. "I think it's just rewriting history.

- Rachel Clarke

I gritted my teeth as he sought to airbrush away one of the most striking conclusions in Baroness Hallett's second Covid-19 inquiry report: that a week of government vacillation before imposing the first lockdown on 23 March 2020 caused 23,000 excess deaths in England from the coronavirus. "I think that just sounds to me not right," he said, frightfully easily.

If hindsight is what troubles Sir Geoffrey, perhaps I can refer him to the slew of tweets, interviews, quotes and articles from NHS staff from that time. Because for those of us who witnessed the pandemic unfolding inside our hospitals, today's collective amnesia is by far the more pernicious problem. A full two weeks before lockdown, for example, I wrote a piece in a national newspaper on how to persuade your elderly parents to self-isolate for their own protection. A colleague on a Covid ward in London told the Guardian: "The government has given up, hasn't it? They are throwing us into the slaughterhouse."

On 19 March - the same day Boris Johnson told us it would take 12 weeks to turn the tide - Northwick Park hospital in London ran out of intensive care beds, and very nearly oxygen. (Still the prime minister refused to lock the country down.) That weekend, at the end of a day ferrying critically ill Covid patients to other hospitals, my friend Nat Silvey, an intensive care doctor, shared a picture of her haggard face on Twitter, hoping to persuade people to stay at home, pleading: "As a frontline doctor in London - you really, really need to take this seriously. Today I have just seen what Covid-19 is doing and now I just want to scream at people to listen to us."