A major report by MPs criticises the UK's early response to the Covid outbreak, saying "big mistakes" were made
The late lockdown in early 2020 "ranks as one of the most important public health failures" the UK has ever had
The report also says "many thousands" of care home deaths could have been avoided
And it criticises the test-and-trace programme for its "slow, uncertain and often chaotic performance"
But the MPs praise the vaccine programme and rollout as one of the best in the world
A campaign group has criticised the report, saying the MPs "explicitly refused" to meet bereaved families
Minister Steve Barclay defends the government's response, saying it always followed scientific advice
The UK reported 38,520 cases on Tuesday, as well as 181 new Covid deaths
Thanks for joining us for our coverage of today's report on the successes and failings of the government's coronavirus pandemic response.
We're closing our live page now but will be back with more Covid news tomorrow.
Today's updates were written by George Bowden, Jennifer Meierhans, Joseph Lee and Mary O'Connor and the page was edited by Becky Morton and Chris Clayton.
We hope you have a good evening.
Our live coverage today has focused on a report by MPs on the lessons learned from the UK government's handling of the pandemic so far.
We've been sharing the report's findings as well as reaction throughout the day - here's a recap:
A&E nurse Mark Boothroyd said hospital staff wondered why the UK didn't take the same Covid measures as other nations
As the government's pandemic response comes under renewed scrutiny, A&E nurse Mark Boothroyd recalls the anxiety he and colleagues felt as the number of UK cases began to grow.
“We were wondering when they were going to lock down, we were wondering what other countries were doing and we were wondering why they weren’t copying them," says Boothroyd, who works at St Thomas' Hospital in London.
"They must have thought we were invincible."
He tells the BBC it was "infuriating" when Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on TV on 3 March last year that he shook hands with people he met on a hospital visit, including Covid patients.
"It was completely against all the guidance that was out at the time. It was almost making a joke out of it. That was entirely the wrong message to the public and showed he wasn’t taking the thing seriously,” says Boothroyd.
Along with the discussions about herd immunity, he says it reflected a belief that the country could just "ride it out" like the flu, and misunderstood how bad Covid-19 could be.
Although Covid case numbers in the UK remain high - another 38,520 were reported in the last 24 hours - hospital admissions have fallen slightly.
The 181 deaths in today's figures are higher than the weekly average of 114 - but there is often a delay in deaths being recorded over the weekend, meaning daily figures tend to be higher earlier in the week.
Baroness Ros Altmann, the former pensions minister, has been speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live about the challenges facing care homes, following today's report on the government's response to the pandemic.
She says the sector faces even more of a struggle in future as numbers requiring care increase.
She says there are estimates the care sector will lose up to 70,000 staff if full vaccination is made a condition of employment as planned on 11 November.
"Where are the replacements coming from? We don't allow social care to qualify for relaxed, immigration rules, so we can't get people coming in from overseas," Altmann adds.
BBC Radio 5 Live
A woman has described what it was like not being able to visit her husband in a care home throughout the pandemic.
Lynn’s husband Trevor, who has dementia, went into a care home at the start of the first lockdown.
She told BBC Radio 5 Live: “It still hurts now, a terrible memory, because I couldn’t see him at all for all those weeks.
"I’ve never been on my own before and I couldn’t even access help from my family."
The care home’s rules mean that, even now, Lynn can only visit Trevor for half an hour twice a week – and is only just able to touch him without gloves.
"I haven’t had a hug for 18 months," she said.
Listen to 5 Live on the free BBC Sounds app.
Today's figures show there have been another 38,520 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours.
Cases have been rising since the beginning of the month, with a 13.5% increase over the last seven days compared to the previous week.
The UK also recorded another 181 deaths within 28 days of a positive test.
It’s one of the highest daily figures in recent weeks, but recorded deaths at the beginning of the week can sometimes be inflated by reporting lags over the weekend.
New vaccinations continue at a low level, with 29,172 first doses and 23,632 second doses administered. As of 11 October, 85.6% of people aged over 12 had one dose of the vaccine and 78.6% had two.
Image source, Zoe DavisKaty Davis (left) and her identical twin Emma died with Covid in April 2020
A woman whose twin sisters died within three days of one another after testing positive for Covid says today's report uses the success of the vaccine programme to deflect from earlier failures.
Zoe Davis' sisters Katy and Emma, who were both nurses, died in April 2020.
She says: "Nobody is saying that the vaccine programme hasn't been phenomenal but the frustrating thing is that's a deflection of what is actually being brought to attention and the overall message is that Covid failures have cost lives.
"As somebody who has lost family members you cannot help but think, what if they were in that 20,000 people who might not have lost their lives if the government had implemented social distancing measures a week earlier?
"My relatives have been seen as dispensable they are just numbers on a sheet to them, not the amazing people I know they were.
"Both my sisters were nurses and had an impact on lots of people's lives, they were valued members of society, how can people like that be labelled dispensable?"
Image source, Getty ImagesAs we've been hearing, Science Minister George Freeman has suggested that a major cause of the UK's Covid death toll was the country's high rate of obesity- related disease. But that's far from the only explanation.
BBC health correspondent Nick Triggle, data journalist Christine Jeavans and head of statistics Robert Cuffe examined the reasons back in January when the death toll was at about 100,000 - now it is over 137,000.
They found that obesity was a factor, with some studies suggesting it doubled the risk of death for an individual.
The UK also has high levels of diabetes, kidney disease and respiratory problems, all of which increase the risk of Covid. These health issues are compounded by inequality in the UK, with the pandemic exacerbating the gap in health and life expectancy between the wealthy and the poor.
Some other factors may have been outside the UK's control.
The UK - and London in particular - is a global hub. By the end of March 2020 the virus had been introduced from 1,300 separate locations.
Countries such as Australia and New Zealand never had to deal with this on such a scale.
The UK is also among the 10 most densely populated big nations - those with more than 20 million people - which meant the virus could spread quickly.
They also examined policy mistakes, including the delay in the first lockdown, although they say the data available to scientists and politicians making the decision at the time was poor.
The fact that the UK only launched its Test and Trace system in May highlighted another failing - we were not prepared, especially compared to Asian countries which already had testing and contact tracing systems in place for a pandemic.
And in considering the delays over introducing later lockdowns, they quote one expert saying "the failure to learn from wave one stands out" as a reason for the UK's poor response to the pandemic.
Image source, Lobby AkinnolaLobby Akinnola (right) lost his father Olufemi (centre) to Covid
A science minister's remarks suggesting the high UK death toll was partly due to obesity-related disease are "hideously offensive", a campaign group representing families who lost loved ones to coronavirus says.
Lobby Akinnola, a spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, says: “If it’s not bad enough Steve Barclay refuses to say sorry over a dozen times or Jeremy Hunt insensitively describing the government response as a 'game of two halves' we now have the Science Minister George Freeman seemingly blaming the British people themselves for the high death toll by saying the higher death toll is caused by obesity.
"It’s grossly offensive to those of us who lost loved ones to Covid-19 and makes a mockery of our concerns - the statutory inquiry truly cannot come soon enough.
"If the prime minister can apologise constantly for losses of liberty he can apologise for the failings the government made that caused our loved ones to lose their lives.
"And Mr Freeman can certainly say sorry for his hideously offensive comments and the flippancy he seems to associate mistakes with when he says 'of course mistakes were made'. What he has failed to highlight is those mistakes cost lives.”
MPs were critical in their report of the UK government's decision to delay the first nationwide lockdown in March 2020.
But the UK was not alone - countries including Germany and France also had similar gaps between detecting their first cases and introducing lockdown measures.
However, countries such as China and Italy acted more quickly.
Image source, Getty ImagesSir Patrick Vallance was often seen flanking the prime minister at Downing Street briefings
We've got a bit more from Patrick Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser, who recorded an interview with BBC Radio 4 before today's report came out and touched on some of the criticisms of the government response.
He said that his "mantra" for a long time in the pandemic has been that "you've got to go sooner than you want to in terms of taking interventions, you've got to go harder than you want to, and you've got to go more geographically broad than you want to".
That's a stark contrast from his BBC interview on 13 March 2020, external, when he said the aim was to "reduce the peak" of infections, "not to suppress it completely", saying that the population would build up a "degree of herd immunity".
Vallance suggested in his latest interview that they were dealing with a new virus and as new evidence came in, the scientific judgements changed.
"For a politician, that feels like a U-turn, or for the media that often feels like a U-turn," he said. "It's not a U-turn, this is new evidence that gives you a new position: this is the way we progress, the way we learn."
Image source, Getty ImagesEluned Morgan said governments had a "huge amount to learn" about the new virus
Wales' health minister Eluned Morgan was asked about the refusal of minister Stephen Barclay to apologise on Sky News for policy failings that led to Covid deaths in the UK.
She said: “I never really understood why politicians have such a problem in apologising.
“And so yes, of course I’m prepared to apologise to all of those who have suffered during the pandemic."
Governments faced a new disease no one had seen before, and none of them knew what its effects would be or that it could spread by people who did not have any symptoms, she said, so they had "a huge amount to learn".
"I think we have a duty and responsibility to say sorry to people where we’ve made mistakes," she added.
Science minister George Freeman has been defending the government's Covid response, telling BBC Radio 4's World At One programme that the pandemic "caught the world by surprise".
He says "every country around the world has been hit hard" with nations getting things right and wrong, adding: "There was no perfect experience."
Asked about the higher UK death toll, he says: "But a lot of that is actually to do with the very, very heavy obesity-related cardiometabolic chronic disease cohort that we've been carrying for years - that's a failure of public health in this country over decades.
"The prime minister was constantly last year apologising to the British people for the appalling loss of liberty and all of the measures that the government had to take.
"Look, I think the public would look at last year and say of course mistakes were made, but in the end this country led the world in finding a vaccine, developing a vaccine, inventing it."
Image source, Getty ImagesMinisters have rejected suggestions that the UK's first lockdown was ordered too late by saying they followed the science.
So what were the scientists telling them in the early months of 2020 as the virus spread across the world? Here's a timeline compiled from the Commons committees' report and minutes of government science advisers' meetings:
Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, says today's report by MPs proves social care "was something of an afterthought" in the initial months of Covid.
She says "the focus on 'protecting the NHS' inadvertently resulted in older people and staff in care homes being badly let down".
Meanwhile, Teresa Exelby of the Community Integrated Care Charity, tells BBC Radio 5 Live there are now concerns about staffing in the sector.
She says there has been both a "massive decline" in new applicants over the past three months and the number of staff staying in employment.
More from Dame Deirdre Hine who says while today's report is "rightly critical" it is also "sympathetic to the point that there were some unknowns".
She says: "The asymptomatic transmissibility of the virus was not well- known and also the fact that the Alpha variant was so much more infectious was not well-known and each of those were part of the cause of the delays of the two lockdowns," she says.
Dame Deidre, former chief medical officer for Wales, also says although a public inquiry is important, she does not think its findings are "going to be relevant to what happens this winter" because they take a long time.
Dame Deirdre Hine
A former chief medical officer says she warned of the dangers of "group-think" - a criticism made by MPs in their Covid response report - when she led the review into the swine flu pandemic in 2009.
Dame Deirdre Hine says a specific recommendation of her 2009 report was that in future pandemics information should be shared with a wider group of scientists to avoid group decisions being unchallenged.
She tells BBC Radio 4's World at One programme: "I felt that there was a danger of group think in the [swine flu] pandemic and I explored the idea of releasing Sage papers to a wider group of scientists, so that this group would be able to comment authoritatively on the overall government strategy and give the media greater assurance about the approach being taken."
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is calling for the future public inquiry into the government's handling of Covid to happen sooner.
He says ministers should "accept responsibility" for the failures set out in the joint report from MPs.
He thinks the government should "have the decency" to apologise to bereaved families.
And he adds: "The public will be tearing their hair out at the lack of leadership."
As we reported earlier (see post at 12:02), Labour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth has described the report as "damning".
Image source, Getty ImagesDischarging people from hospitals into care homes led to many thousands of avoidable deaths, the report said
If you're just joining us on your lunch-break, we've been covering the reaction to a highly critical report by MPs on the government's coronavirus response today. Here are some of the main points: