Image source, Crown Copyright

We're now on to Kirsten Heaven, who is asking questions for the Welsh Covid-19 bereaved families for justice group.

Heaven is asking about the very early days of the pandemic. She says there was no Welsh representation until 5 March 2020, the 13th Sage meeting on Covid.

She asks if he agrees it indicates that the Welsh government were not included when they should have been.

Whitty says it was a chaotic starting point and if he was in that situation again they would have included them much more quickly.

Having input from Welsh scientists was undoubtedly a benefit, Whitty says, and provided a "useful challenge" in general.

The hearing moves on to travel restrictions.

Wilcock asks whether the UK should have treated the islands of Britain and Ireland as separate entities in an effort to reduce Covid transmission.

Whitty responds, firmly, that it would have been "very suprising" for Sage to ask him to give his view on this area.

The alignment of Northern Island is "one of the most politically difficult areas in UK politics," he says.

Whitty is now being asked about Northern Ireland's participation in Sage - the government's scientific advisory group.

Wilcock says it was only in late March 2020 that Northern Ireland had full participation in the group after the chief scientific adviser for Northern Ireland became a full attendee.

Very quickly, Whitty reacts and says that should have happened earlier. "We would all agree that."

He also adds that there is a balancing act in terms of having geographical representation - which he says is important - and wanting to have the best scientists around the table, which means looking at universities that are often concentrated in certain areas.

Image source, Crown Copyright

Pete Wilcock KC is now asking questions on behalf of the Northern Ireland Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice.

Was Whitty aware of the "unique problems" when it comes to tackling a pandemic on the island of Ireland?

Whitty, who advised the UK government and therefore had remit over Northern Ireland, says that he was indeed aware.

He says the response was complex, as the impact of Covid in Northern Ireland would naturally be affected by the impact of Covid in the Republic of Ireland. The two nations share a border but the Republic of Ireland is not part of the United Kingdom.

Whitty also acknowleges the "complexity of politics" - some political factions in Northern Ireland would want the nation's Covid policy to align with the Republic of Ireland, others would want to move in step with England, Scotland and Wales.

Image source, Reuters

Whitty is asked about the Diamond Princess - a luxury cruise ship where Covid took hold in February 2020 - an analysis of which showed that asymptomatic transmission was having "a real impact".

He is asked if they should have understood asymptomatic transmission better at that point.

Whitty says there should have been more urgency either way, not only predicated on asymptomatic transmission.

He says the scaling of testing should not have been dependent on asymptomatic transmission, neither the need of PPE.

Whitty also says there is still no confidence now about the number of asymptomatic transmissions at the time but acknowledges it was a major issue.

Image source, Crown Copyright

Back from the break, Sir Chris Whitty is taking questions from Pete Weatherby KC, who is representing the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice.

He's asking Whitty about a diplomatic report, sent in January 2020, detailing the asymptomatic transmission of Covid in Wuhan, China.

Weatherby questions whether the impact of asymptomatic transmission - when a person with Covid does not present symptoms but passes the virus on - was "underplayed" during the pandemic's early days.

Whitty replies: "At this point we were probably thinking it wasn't a major driver of pandemic".

Professor Sir Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for England, was questioned this morning - for a second day - by Hugo Keith KC.

Whitty was examined about his role as one of the government’s foremost advisers during the Covid pandemic.

Today, Whitty was asked about his approaches to managing the Covid infection rates. This is what we learnt:

• There was a large focus on herd immunity and whether it was achievable by June 2020. Herd immunity occurs when a large proportion of the population becomes immune to a disease following infection
• Whitty says he had no idea whether the population would get to the natural herd immunity threshold which had to impact 80 per cent of the population. It was less than 20% at that time
• He also added that the debate around herd immunity came from a “mashed up” understanding, saying it was a communication error that gave the impression it would have worked

• On the lockdowns, Whitty says had the transmission rate been lower, we wouldn’t have had a mandatory lockdown in March 2020. But because of the rate of infection was ever increasing, a lockdown happened
• Whitty argued that a mandatory lockdown was needed for people to follow the Covid measures

Sir Chris Whitty is back in his seat to give more evidence to the UK's Covid inquiry.

Stay with us and we’ll bring you all the updates here, and watch it live by pressing Play at the top of this page.

What is the Great Barrington Declaration?published at 11:20 Greenwich Mean Time 22 November 2023

11:20 GMT 22 November 2023

Jim Reed
Health reporter, BBC News

This morning we heard about the Great Barrington Declaration - or GBD.

It was an open letter published in October 2020 and originally signed by three academics, including Prof Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University.

The authors said they had "grave concerns" about the "damaging physical and mental health impacts" of Covid lockdowns.

The alternative suggested in the GBD was to put in place "focused protection" of the most vulnerable while letting others resume their lives as normal.

Giving evidence, Sir Chris Whitty was scathing in his assessment of this idea saying it had a "very large number of problems with it".

"It's quite rare I utterly disagree with a group of academics," he said.

"This was one of the few areas where I thought we should knock it out of the park rather than debate it."

Just before the break, questions turned to the second lockdown.

Whitty is asked if there was an alternative public health option to doing that, with Keith stressing that he should only consider public health, not the economic situation

"I couldn't see many options," Whitty says, considering the situation at the time.

He says that the second lockdown was pretty much inevitable, but could have been less stringent if previous decisions about measures to hold off a second wave had been taken differently.

Image source, Crown Copyright

Inquiry Chair Baroness Hallett has stopped proceedings until 11:15

When the inquiry returns we will hear some more from Sir Chris Whitty.

Then later we'll hear evidence from the former Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam.

Stay with us for the latest updates and analysis.

We've now been shown extracts from reports in which advisers, ministers and officials discuss the impact of Covid on the NHS.

Whitty tells the inquiry that hospital critical care units were always the first things that were going to get "overtopped".

He adds that there was "almost no margin for error" - the difference between a unit struggling to cope and being totally unable to function could be a just a weeks time.

We're now hearing about Sunday night, on March 22. Whitty is asked whether there was a thought that they should hold off lockdown for another week, to see if the countermeasures already in place might still help.

Whitty says that by the time they got to that weekend nobody wanted to take such a risk, because holding off could have put them in "very deep trouble".

He says everyone wanted to "shrink that wave as fast as possible," and that there was no debate about waiting as the infection numbers were stark.

Whitty explains that before announcing the first lockdown, ministers and advisers discussed whether the measure would significantly slow the mortality rate.

However, "the key" was to get the R rate below one, he says. The reproduction 'R' rate is the speed at which the virus spreads.

Keith moves on to a report published shortly before a full lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020.

The report laid out that Covid was capable of causing a significant number of deaths and had the potential to overwhelm the NHS.

Was the report a "game-changer", Keith asks?

Whitty says it wasn't - and it wasn't supposed to be.

He says he wrote the report so people had access to a short, accessible summary - it was "simply a distillation of lots of things that were already going on".

Lockdown fatigue was 'prominent error'published at 10:45 Greenwich Mean Time 22 November 2023

10:45 GMT 22 November 2023

Jim Reed
Health reporter, BBC News

One controversial idea introduced ahead of the first lockdown - at least as far as the science was concerned - was the concept of behavioural fatigue.

This was the argument that restrictions should be delayed as long as possible because the British public would tire of lockdown and rates of compliance would drop.

Sir Chris Whitty himself referred to this broad concept in a number of news conferences in February and March 2020.

Other behavioural scientists on Sage were heavily criticial at the time, saying that the idea was not supported by any evidence.

Speaking this morning, Whitty just described using the phrase as his most "prominent communications error".

"This is one where my communications were really poor, frankly," he added.

At the time Sage issued a statement saying that public or behavioural fatigue should not be taken as a reason to delay action.

From that point on Whitty said he "did not say anything more about it".

"The debate was not unreasonable [but] the discussion of it in public and linking it to the first lockdown was really unhelpful and that's entirely on me," he said.

Whitty says that polls at the time showed that a great majority of people said they would adhere to measures but that an even higher proportion of people said they weren't confident other people would.

"That's a very corrosive situation," Whitty says, saying that the advantage of a mandatory lockdown is that it tells the public that everyone in society will have to adhere to rules.

"If you make a sacrifice and your family makes a sacrifice, so is everybody else. It had that additional benefit of making clear to people that it was across the board," Whitty says.

We're now hearing about decion-making in the lead up to the 16 March 2020 - when the government imposed its first ever set of Covid restrictions.

Whitty says that officials and advisers were in an extraordinarily difficult position and realised they needed to quickly impose measures like self-isolation and working from home.

Whitty says the restrictions were the "antithesis" to Boris Johnson's "whole philosophy", but he made the move as he recognised how dire things were getting.

Was the government pursuing herd immunity?published at 10:35 Greenwich Mean Time 22 November 2023

10:35 GMT 22 November 2023

Nick Triggle
Health Correspondent

A fair bit of time was spent this morning trying to unravel whether the government was pursuing a strategy of herd immunity at the start of the pandemic. Both Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance used the phrase when Covid first hit. But Whitty in his evidence this morning suggested the interpretation of strategy got mashed up.

He made it clear that herd immunity – in terms of getting to the point where enough people have been infected, that the virus cannot spread anymore was not being pursued.

Instead, what the government was initially planning – and which the first lockdown put a stop to – was to manage the initial wave in the hope it would happen over the summer and not during the winter when the NHS was busy.

To do that requires being able to slow transmission and protect the most vulnerable when infections are reaching a peak – and avoid the situation where you get an over-shoot of infections before they peak because the virus is spreading so quickly.

What the scientists had not appreciated was just how quickly Covid was spreading, which led to the fear it would quickly overwhelm the NHS if drastic action wasn’t taken.

Whitty is now asked about the degree of inevitability of lockdowns.

He says they realised two things. Firstly, they were "significantly further along the path" of infections than they had thought, which led to an acceleration of a lot of thinking and activity, and that policy had to be brought forward quickly

The second thing they realised was that they needed "a large number of measures" to get on top of the situation.

In theory, had the force of transmission been lower, Whitty says, it might have been possible to get to the desired levels "reliably" without a mandatory lockdown, but once the UK got above a certain force of transmission it looked "extremely unlikely that we could get reliably to that stage".