Coronavirus isn’t even over yet and I can already predict its toxic legacy

Just as with Grenfell, Iraq or the Hillsborough disaster, the signs are that many bereaved families will be denied closure, and inquests will deny justice, writes Sean O'Grady

It’s sure to become another battleground in the unending British culture wars (PA)

Without wishing to fall into that supposed dreadful trap of media “negativity” – I call it “reality” by the way – and admitting my lack of expertise, I’d say that the number of deaths from Covid-19 will top 40,000. That is a conservative estimate, given it is up to almost 30,000 now. Adding in those who die indirectly, through delayed cancer treatment or late diagnoses of other conditions, and it could well be tens of thousands more. If there’s a strong second wave, then perhaps still more.

I can quite understand the experts’ caution about forecasting such numbers, and they’re right. They may also be rightly wary of early international comparisons. Whichever way you look at it, though, many, many thousands of loved ones have, because of Covid-19, already been taken before their time, as Boris Johnson memorably put it. Yet more victims of the virus will survive but suffer long-term ill health due to organ damage.

Many survivors, and families and friends of those who have died, will be looking for answers, for redress and for justice over the coming months and years. Most poignant will be the stories of those working in the NHS, in care homes, in dentists’ and GPs’ surgeries, in pharmacies, in ambulances, prisons, even public transport and other locations where they had a reasonable expectation that their employers and the authorities would give them the personal protective equipment (PPE) they deserved.

The signs are that many bereaved families will be denied closure. Inquests will deny justice: the latest guidance states that coroners need not investigate the role of PPE failures in the deaths of NHS staff – surely against all natural justice and common sense.

In due course, there will probably be some sort of public enquiry into the official response to the coronavirus crisis and it will probably drag on for years and be thorough only in being thoroughly unsatisfactory. History shows that a determined government with a firm grip on bureaucracy can, almost literally, get away with murder. Bloody Sunday; the Hillsborough disaster; the wars in the Falklands and Iraq; Grenfell – all scandals where official inquiries at least initially fell far short of the task.

The tricks, well practised in previous exercises, will be no doubt be deployed again. Watch out for them. The ways to win the public inquiry game include: pick the “right”, establishment-minded chair, so pressure doesn’t even need to be applied; craftily limit the terms of reference; restrict the release of crucial papers and records, but also drown the inquiry in irrelevant documents and data; be economical with the truth in giving witness evidence; above all, delay and delay and delay until the next election is past, and, preferably, those responsible have taken the usual peerage and a comfortable retirement.

It’s a wearily familiar pattern. Decades pass before grieving families find out the truth, and for some it’ll be far too late. It will be unforgivable, but it won’t be a surprise.

So these will be among the toxic legacies of Covid-19 – the denial of truth and justice, a further poisoning of public life, another battleground in the unending British culture wars. The guilty men and women of 2020 are getting their “narrative” together even now. You can sense it emerging: it was China’s cover-up and the World Health Organisation’s bungling; Public Health England were responsible for neglecting the stockpiles and pandemic planning; it was “the wrong kind of flu”, a type impossible to prepare for; there were global shortages of everything; ministers were “guided by the science” throughout, so it’s Sage and the experts’ fault; we avoided being overwhelmed by the peak; we made mistakes, sort of, in hindsight, but every government does, inevitably; the media are exaggerating the failings; and so on.

No matter that some countries definitely and obviously contained it far better, with far fewer deaths, than Britain. The very figures, in the press and in politics, who now clap for the carers, campaign to give the nurses a medal and offer lavish praise for “frontline heroes” are the very same ones who wanted to replace the NHS with the likes of Bupa, shrink what was left into a “safety net for the poor” and starved public health and social care funds for decades. It is they who will stand accused, and it is they who will try to dodge their responsibility. As we have seen, that’s the one thing they are world leaders at.