We're closing our live coverage. Before we go, here are the key takeaways from the Covid inquiry today.
Oliver Letwin, former minister of state, appeared first. He said he regretted not following up on pandemic concerns. He said another team was needed to address concerns that risk assessments weren't asking the right questions
George Osborne, the former Chancellor, was up next. He said the Treasury had not planned for lockdowns, but added that spending cuts under his tenure meant the UK was better able to cope with the financial pressures of the pandemic
Former Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies appeared in the afternoon. She became tearful as she apologised to relatives of people who lost their lives to Covid
She said a generation had been damaged, and a better approach to pandemic preparedness needs to be in place
This page was edited by James Harness, Alys Davies, Aoife Walsh and Rob Corp. Our writers were Emily McGarvey, Imogen James, Ali Abbas Ahmadi and Emily Atkinson.
WATCH: 'It wasn't just the deaths, it was the way they died'
Video content
Video caption: Prof Davies apologises to relatives of Covid victimsProf Davies apologises to relatives of Covid victims
Prof Davies seemed to choke up as she paid tribute to the relatives of Covid victims.
"It was horrible, and I heard a lot about from my daughter on the front line as a young doctor in Scotland," she said.
"It was harrowing, and it remains horrible."
Prof Davies makes pandemic response suggestions
Keith asks Davies if she has other recommendations or suggestions to provide for better pandemic planning in future.
Davies says there are two main issues that she was worried about during Covid.
She says the first issue was groups decided "based on no evidence that the public wouldn't like lockdown so they wouldn't do it, there was no evidence".
"What they should've said was there is no evidence you will want to consider," she says.
She thinks a second group to advise on these topics needs to be established.
Another concern was about data and "how it was handled to help the nation do better."
"We weren't, as far as I can see, accessing and using all data," she adds.
A much broader church of experts needed - Prof Davies
Keith asks Prof Davies how much behavioural change - using lockdowns as an example - were considered in pandemic plans.
Davies says the UK needs separate committees to think about societal behaviour, with "a much broader church of experts."
Exercise Cygnus found UK pandemic plans were not sufficient
We can bring you more now from Prof Davies' appearance at the inquiry.
Keith moves on to Cygnus, a tier 1 national level pandemic influenza exercise, which involved nearly 1,000 representatives to test the UK's preparedness to an influenza outbreak.
Davies was the CMO at this stage.
He says the conclusion from Exercise Cygnus was that the UK's plans and response were not sufficient to cope with severe demands of a pandemic and asks if she was concerned about this conclusion.
He says the report makes clear she'd called for more regular programming for tier 1 pandemic exercises and that these should be
conducted at the beginning of every new Parliament.
She says she hoped it would spur more work.
He asks if she was aware that of the 22 recommendations, only a bare majority were completed.
Inquiry ends for the day
Keith has finished his questioning, bringing the inquiry to a close for today.
Baroness Hallett has stepped away.
Stay with us as we bring you the last lines from the questioning of Prof Dame Sally Davies.
Recommendations from virus exercise weren't introduced - Prof Davies
.Copyright: .
Keith has turned now to two virus exercises, called Alice and Cygnus.
Exercise Alice took place in 2016 after an outbreak of Mers - a type of Coronavirus - in Asia.
Keith asks: "Can you recall now why the work streams that were designed to give effect to the Exercise Alice recommendations, particularly in relation to quarantine and mass contact tracing, don't appear to have borne fruit?"
Davies says no, adding: "I instigated it, I felt we needed it. My understanding was having written the report, which of course I saw, that they would get on and make sure that they addressed the agreed recommendations."
'We have damaged a generation'
Prof Davies agrees with that there needs to be a better approach to counter groupthink when dealing with pandemic preparedness.
But she added that there is a "limited amount of money and limited people both in the policy space and the delivery space."
She said we must look at existing plans and amend them going forward - such as thinking about how long to continue a lockdown.
She speaks about the "damage" the pandemic has had on children and students, saying the "educational impact tells me that education has a terrific amount of work to do."
"We have damaged a generation, and it is awful... watching these people struggle," she said, adding that the government must have plans to help them.
Building relationships with other countries is key to outbreak response - Davies
BBCCopyright: BBC
Prof Davies acknowledges the department would've benefitted from an understanding of Asian countries' response to other outbreaks, including Mers and Sars.
Asked how the department can learn, Davies says it needs to "continue to engage with WHO and through WHO we build relationships with other countries.
"But I also think we need to look at how we bring in external challenge and it is something about an open policy approach which I was clearly made for in that I love to have a debate," she says.
No good outcome without resilience in public health, says Prof Davies
Keith asks about the lack of consideration about the Covid threat, citing a report in the field of pathogenic learning, and says it was well understood that the next pathogenic pandemic could have very different characteristics.
Davies says if the response to flu was well prepared the UK should have been able to pivot pretty effectively.
But she says the government learned measures during the Ebola crisis, such as screening at airports and quarantining at an airport, they could call on in future.
She then says "yes, the government didn't do the plans (for Covid) but we didn't
have resilience either".
"You can't get a good outcome if you don't have resilience in the
public's health" and that it had been disinvested in.
Compared to similar countries
per 100,000 population, the UK was on the bottom of the table on the number of doctors, nurses, beds,
IT units and ventilators, she adds.
She says the only thing we had resilience in, which saved
millions on lives, was R&D (the scientific and research base in the UK).
'We thought flu was the thing to focus on'
Prof Davies defends what Keith terms as a "bias" towards preparing for an influenza pandemic, saying that it wasn’t just the UK that had concluded an influenza pandemic was likely.
“It wasn’t just us – this was the whole global north, the Western world thought that flu was the thing to focus on," she says.
She also warns that there had been four flu pandemics in the past century, and that “there will be more”.
“Clearly, we could have done more thinking”, she says, adding that the system needed to be challenged by other perspectives.
She says she asked for a Sars review, but was told: “Oh no, it won’t come here.”
Prof Davies apologises to relatives of Covid victims
Davies takes a moment to say how sorry she is to the relatives of those who lost their lives to Covid-19.
"It wasn't just the deaths, it was the way they died," she says through tears.
"It was horrible and I heard a lot about it from my daughter on the front line as a young doctor in Scotland."
Prof Davies quizzed on national risk assessment input
BBCCopyright: BBC
Keith turns to the issues of the national security risk assessment process that was approved in July 2019 that year, prior to her leaving her post as chief medical officer in October 2019.
"Do you recall having any input into or debating or discussing the draft 2019 national risk assessment?" he asks.
Davies says she doesn't recall but a lot of documents went past her.
He says a point made by the Cabinet Office before this inquiry was that the risk assessment process was subject to a considerable degree of external checks from several pandemic modelling groups and risk assessment steering groups. He asks if they included the CMO.
Not that she can recall, Davies says, but says the chief medical officer at the time, Prof Chris Whitty, was there and says she trusted him.
The highest overall risk was influenza pandemic, says Keith. He asks if there was there a case for involving the office of the chief medical officer in the process of risk assessment to ask the right questions to challenge and to probe.
Davies says she would be surprised if she could second guess Chris Whitty.
'Spaghetti chart' shows complexity of government departments
A complex chart is being shown on the screen, known as the "spaghetti chart", depicting the complexity of government departments.
Towards the top of the chart are the Cobra briefing rooms and underneath is the chief medical officer of England, which was Davies at the time, Keith says.
Davies is answering questions around the structure of government departments and how they worked together, as well as merges to departments and cuts to their budgets.
Pandemic was down to lack of resilience in public health - former CMO
BBCCopyright: BBC
The Coronavirus pandemic's impact on the UK was "not down to health inequality" but the "lack of resilience in the public's health", Prof Davies told the Covid-19 Inquiry.
Davies said: "One reason we had a bad outcome from Covid, and I presume would get from flu, is because of what you have been told are health inequalities.
"I would talk about the lack of resilience in the public's health - 25% of children in year six are obese, 60% of adults are obese or overweight, we have high levels of diabetes".
She asked how the government plays a role in improving the health of people.
"There is a Libertarian view that it's all down to each of us as individuals and how strong we are, but of course it isn't about that. It's about the structure of our society and how to make the healthy choice the easy choice, whether it's activity or what we eat," she said.
Watch the Covid inquiry live
You can watch every moment of the Covid inquiry by pressing the Play icon at the top of this page.
If you can't see the play button please refresh your browser or reload this page on the BBC news app.
BBCCopyright: BBC
CMO has total independence of thought, says Prof Davies
Keith asks Davies if her role as chief medical officer (CMO) was equivalent to the role of departmental chief scientific adviser or if it had a greater degree of independence.
She says the CMO has total independence of thought and ability to advise. The chief scientific adviser is there to advise their department.
She says in that role she tried to help policy teams know what the latest stance was, she says.
Keith then asks about The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and the role of the CMO when it comes to SAGE and dealing with a major health emergency.
She says when she stared in 2010, the pandemic of flu of 2009-10 was declared over but she reviewed how things had went in that pandemic and said it wasn't a very good way of knitting together all the bits of advice to make it as affective as it should be.
They came to an agreement over the following few years that in a medical emergency the CMO would co-chair in SAGE.
Former CMO 'advised on health emergencies'
Keith asks Davies if she was responsible for health protection and if that includes health emergencies, the risk of infectious diseases, pathogenic pandemic and anti microbial resistance.
She says: "I was not responsible, I advised on all those issues. I needed to get the advice from Public Health England academia."
Keith corrects her that he didn't suggest she was responsible for those areas.
Prof Davies begins giving evidence
Prof Dame Sally Davies has just been sworn in. She is third to give evidence in the inquiry today.
Hugo Keith KC, counsel of the inquiry, starts by listing all of the posts she has previously held, including her role as chief scientific adviser to Department of Health and Social Care and as England's chief medical officer between 2010 and 2019.
She was also a member of executive board of the World Health Organization and is now master of Trinity College Cambridge.
She tells Keith that she was also the UK government's most senior medical advisor.
Asked about her role as chief medical officer, Prof Davies says she was a doctor, a leader and an independent advisor to government.
Inquiry restarts
Baroness Hallett has entered the room and taken her seat.
The inquiry is underway again, with Prof Dame Sally Davies, England's former chief medical officer, taking questions.
Live Reporting
Edited by Alys Davies and Aoife Walsh
All times stated are UK
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Oliver Letwin, former minister of state, appeared first. He said he regretted not following up on pandemic concerns. He said another team was needed to address concerns that risk assessments weren't asking the right questions
-
George Osborne, the former Chancellor, was up next. He said the Treasury had not planned for lockdowns, but added that spending cuts under his tenure meant the UK was better able to cope with the financial pressures of the pandemic
-
Former Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies appeared in the afternoon. She became tearful as she apologised to relatives of people who lost their lives to Covid
-
She said a generation had been damaged, and a better approach to pandemic preparedness needs to be in place
Video caption: Prof Davies apologises to relatives of Covid victimsProf Davies apologises to relatives of Covid victims 
.Copyright: . 
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Latest PostWe're closing our coverage
We're closing our live coverage. Before we go, here are the key takeaways from the Covid inquiry today.
This page was edited by James Harness, Alys Davies, Aoife Walsh and Rob Corp. Our writers were Emily McGarvey, Imogen James, Ali Abbas Ahmadi and Emily Atkinson.
WATCH: 'It wasn't just the deaths, it was the way they died'
Video content
Prof Davies seemed to choke up as she paid tribute to the relatives of Covid victims.
"It was horrible, and I heard a lot about from my daughter on the front line as a young doctor in Scotland," she said.
"It was harrowing, and it remains horrible."
Prof Davies makes pandemic response suggestions
Keith asks Davies if she has other recommendations or suggestions to provide for better pandemic planning in future.
Davies says there are two main issues that she was worried about during Covid.
She says the first issue was groups decided "based on no evidence that the public wouldn't like lockdown so they wouldn't do it, there was no evidence".
"What they should've said was there is no evidence you will want to consider," she says.
She thinks a second group to advise on these topics needs to be established.
Another concern was about data and "how it was handled to help the nation do better."
"We weren't, as far as I can see, accessing and using all data," she adds.
A much broader church of experts needed - Prof Davies
Keith asks Prof Davies how much behavioural change - using lockdowns as an example - were considered in pandemic plans.
Davies says the UK needs separate committees to think about societal behaviour, with "a much broader church of experts."
Exercise Cygnus found UK pandemic plans were not sufficient
We can bring you more now from Prof Davies' appearance at the inquiry.
Keith moves on to Cygnus, a tier 1 national level pandemic influenza exercise, which involved nearly 1,000 representatives to test the UK's preparedness to an influenza outbreak.
Davies was the CMO at this stage.
He says the conclusion from Exercise Cygnus was that the UK's plans and response were not sufficient to cope with severe demands of a pandemic and asks if she was concerned about this conclusion.
He says the report makes clear she'd called for more regular programming for tier 1 pandemic exercises and that these should be conducted at the beginning of every new Parliament.
She says she hoped it would spur more work.
He asks if she was aware that of the 22 recommendations, only a bare majority were completed.
Inquiry ends for the day
Keith has finished his questioning, bringing the inquiry to a close for today.
Baroness Hallett has stepped away.
Stay with us as we bring you the last lines from the questioning of Prof Dame Sally Davies.
Recommendations from virus exercise weren't introduced - Prof Davies
Keith has turned now to two virus exercises, called Alice and Cygnus.
Exercise Alice took place in 2016 after an outbreak of Mers - a type of Coronavirus - in Asia.
Keith asks: "Can you recall now why the work streams that were designed to give effect to the Exercise Alice recommendations, particularly in relation to quarantine and mass contact tracing, don't appear to have borne fruit?"
Davies says no, adding: "I instigated it, I felt we needed it. My understanding was having written the report, which of course I saw, that they would get on and make sure that they addressed the agreed recommendations."
'We have damaged a generation'
Prof Davies agrees with that there needs to be a better approach to counter groupthink when dealing with pandemic preparedness.
But she added that there is a "limited amount of money and limited people both in the policy space and the delivery space."
She said we must look at existing plans and amend them going forward - such as thinking about how long to continue a lockdown.
She speaks about the "damage" the pandemic has had on children and students, saying the "educational impact tells me that education has a terrific amount of work to do."
"We have damaged a generation, and it is awful... watching these people struggle," she said, adding that the government must have plans to help them.
Building relationships with other countries is key to outbreak response - Davies
Prof Davies acknowledges the department would've benefitted from an understanding of Asian countries' response to other outbreaks, including Mers and Sars.
Asked how the department can learn, Davies says it needs to "continue to engage with WHO and through WHO we build relationships with other countries.
"But I also think we need to look at how we bring in external challenge and it is something about an open policy approach which I was clearly made for in that I love to have a debate," she says.
No good outcome without resilience in public health, says Prof Davies
Keith asks about the lack of consideration about the Covid threat, citing a report in the field of pathogenic learning, and says it was well understood that the next pathogenic pandemic could have very different characteristics.
Davies says if the response to flu was well prepared the UK should have been able to pivot pretty effectively.
But she says the government learned measures during the Ebola crisis, such as screening at airports and quarantining at an airport, they could call on in future.
She then says "yes, the government didn't do the plans (for Covid) but we didn't have resilience either".
"You can't get a good outcome if you don't have resilience in the public's health" and that it had been disinvested in.
Compared to similar countries per 100,000 population, the UK was on the bottom of the table on the number of doctors, nurses, beds, IT units and ventilators, she adds.
She says the only thing we had resilience in, which saved millions on lives, was R&D (the scientific and research base in the UK).
'We thought flu was the thing to focus on'
Prof Davies defends what Keith terms as a "bias" towards preparing for an influenza pandemic, saying that it wasn’t just the UK that had concluded an influenza pandemic was likely.
“It wasn’t just us – this was the whole global north, the Western world thought that flu was the thing to focus on," she says.
She also warns that there had been four flu pandemics in the past century, and that “there will be more”.
“Clearly, we could have done more thinking”, she says, adding that the system needed to be challenged by other perspectives.
She says she asked for a Sars review, but was told: “Oh no, it won’t come here.”
Prof Davies apologises to relatives of Covid victims
Davies takes a moment to say how sorry she is to the relatives of those who lost their lives to Covid-19.
"It wasn't just the deaths, it was the way they died," she says through tears.
"It was horrible and I heard a lot about it from my daughter on the front line as a young doctor in Scotland."
Prof Davies quizzed on national risk assessment input
Keith turns to the issues of the national security risk assessment process that was approved in July 2019 that year, prior to her leaving her post as chief medical officer in October 2019.
"Do you recall having any input into or debating or discussing the draft 2019 national risk assessment?" he asks.
Davies says she doesn't recall but a lot of documents went past her.
He says a point made by the Cabinet Office before this inquiry was that the risk assessment process was subject to a considerable degree of external checks from several pandemic modelling groups and risk assessment steering groups. He asks if they included the CMO.
Not that she can recall, Davies says, but says the chief medical officer at the time, Prof Chris Whitty, was there and says she trusted him.
The highest overall risk was influenza pandemic, says Keith. He asks if there was there a case for involving the office of the chief medical officer in the process of risk assessment to ask the right questions to challenge and to probe.
Davies says she would be surprised if she could second guess Chris Whitty.
'Spaghetti chart' shows complexity of government departments
A complex chart is being shown on the screen, known as the "spaghetti chart", depicting the complexity of government departments.
Towards the top of the chart are the Cobra briefing rooms and underneath is the chief medical officer of England, which was Davies at the time, Keith says.
Davies is answering questions around the structure of government departments and how they worked together, as well as merges to departments and cuts to their budgets.
Pandemic was down to lack of resilience in public health - former CMO
The Coronavirus pandemic's impact on the UK was "not down to health inequality" but the "lack of resilience in the public's health", Prof Davies told the Covid-19 Inquiry.
Davies said: "One reason we had a bad outcome from Covid, and I presume would get from flu, is because of what you have been told are health inequalities.
"I would talk about the lack of resilience in the public's health - 25% of children in year six are obese, 60% of adults are obese or overweight, we have high levels of diabetes".
She asked how the government plays a role in improving the health of people.
"There is a Libertarian view that it's all down to each of us as individuals and how strong we are, but of course it isn't about that. It's about the structure of our society and how to make the healthy choice the easy choice, whether it's activity or what we eat," she said.
Watch the Covid inquiry live
You can watch every moment of the Covid inquiry by pressing the Play icon at the top of this page.
If you can't see the play button please refresh your browser or reload this page on the BBC news app.
CMO has total independence of thought, says Prof Davies
Keith asks Davies if her role as chief medical officer (CMO) was equivalent to the role of departmental chief scientific adviser or if it had a greater degree of independence.
She says the CMO has total independence of thought and ability to advise. The chief scientific adviser is there to advise their department.
She says in that role she tried to help policy teams know what the latest stance was, she says.
Keith then asks about The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and the role of the CMO when it comes to SAGE and dealing with a major health emergency.
She says when she stared in 2010, the pandemic of flu of 2009-10 was declared over but she reviewed how things had went in that pandemic and said it wasn't a very good way of knitting together all the bits of advice to make it as affective as it should be.
They came to an agreement over the following few years that in a medical emergency the CMO would co-chair in SAGE.
Former CMO 'advised on health emergencies'
Keith asks Davies if she was responsible for health protection and if that includes health emergencies, the risk of infectious diseases, pathogenic pandemic and anti microbial resistance.
She says: "I was not responsible, I advised on all those issues. I needed to get the advice from Public Health England academia."
Keith corrects her that he didn't suggest she was responsible for those areas.
Prof Davies begins giving evidence
Prof Dame Sally Davies has just been sworn in. She is third to give evidence in the inquiry today.
Hugo Keith KC, counsel of the inquiry, starts by listing all of the posts she has previously held, including her role as chief scientific adviser to Department of Health and Social Care and as England's chief medical officer between 2010 and 2019.
She was also a member of executive board of the World Health Organization and is now master of Trinity College Cambridge.
She tells Keith that she was also the UK government's most senior medical advisor.
Asked about her role as chief medical officer, Prof Davies says she was a doctor, a leader and an independent advisor to government.
Inquiry restarts
Baroness Hallett has entered the room and taken her seat.
The inquiry is underway again, with Prof Dame Sally Davies, England's former chief medical officer, taking questions.