The coronavirus christened COVID-19 first appeared in China in late 2019, though exactly when is still uncertain. By early September 2020 it had led to the deaths of more than 880,000 people in countries from Algeria to Zimbabwe, and spanning all the world’s continents – the most deadly pandemic for just over 100 years. No one knows when it will end but it is likely to be around for a long time with eventual control achieved by vaccination.

It is not as severe as Spanish flu, which affected close to a third of the world’s population in 1918, 1919 and 1920 and led to the deaths of more than 50 million people world-wide (though some scholars put the number of deaths at closer to 100 million).

Various organisations, most notably the World Health Organization, had issued repeated warnings in recent years of the likelihood of a pandemic and had urged countries to be prepared but, when COVID-19 appeared, the majority of countries, including the UK, were under-prepared, some woefully unready.

The diary which follows covers some of the major events and decisions, and includes comments from individuals, publications, organisations, government departments, advisory bodies and numerous websites. It’s mainly about how the UK handled the disease but also reports on what happened in a number of other countries – and how some of those countries watched the British response with an air of disbelief.

Following the diary entries, there are eight appendices which give fuller details of actions and enquiries, the various bodies involved and how matters such as personal protective equipment were handled. Exchanges in the House of Commons are also noted.

Included are some remarkable comments by senior ministers and civil servants, quite a number of them intended to mislead the public.

One of the more outrageous was from “a Cabinet Office spokesperson” who commented in June on the decision by the Prime Minister to disband the committee which had been meant to prepare the country for a pandemic. The spokesperson said: “The Government has taken the right steps at the right time to combat this pandemic.” It’s hard to imagine a comment further removed from the truth.

What emerges is a tale of missed opportunities, complacency in the early months of 2020 and heaps of confusion. Some things were certainly done right but in the UK many of the proper steps were taken too late and some highly improper steps were also taken.

On 30th January, WHO gave a risk assessment of “high” for the world but it was not until 11th March that WHO declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic, with more than 118,000 cases of the illness identified in over 110 countries and territories and “a sustained risk of further global spread”.

The WHO director-general stated: “If countries detect, test, treat, isolate, trace and mobilise their people in the response, those with a handful of COVID-19 cases can prevent those cases becoming clusters and those clusters becoming community transmission.”

He also said: This is not just a public health crisis, it is a crisis that will touch every sector, so every sector and every individual must be involved in the fight.”

And so, on 12th March, the four chief medical officers of the UK raised the perceived risk level in the UK from medium to high.

It was later reported that the rate of virus importation peaked around 15th March – but there had been no action of any sort at airports other than the placing of a few notices. The UK was one of very few affected countries to have no border checks or quarantine arrangements in mid March.

Professor Sir John Bell of the University of Oxford, and the government’s “Life Sciences Champion”, when questioned by the House of Commons health and social care committee on 21st July, said that one of the UK’s biggest failures was not being on the “front foot”. He said: “The fact that we were asleep to the concept that we were going to have a pandemic, I think, shame on us. Since the year 2000 we’ve had eight close calls of emerging infectious diseases, any one of which could have swept the globe as a pandemic.”

Exercise Cygnus in 2017 – a government simulation of an influenza pandemic –  stated as its “key learning” that “the UK’s preparedness and response, in terms of its plans, policies and capability, was not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic that will have a nationwide impact across all sectors”, but little notice was taken of that and the report had been kept under wraps by the government.

One member of the government’s scientific advisory group, SAGE, spoke of the “complacency and arrogance” at the outset when Mr Johnson did not focus on the looming crisis. He didn’t say it but it is clear from the meetings of SAGE in January and February, and even into early March, that there was no sense of urgency and hence a lack of clear guidance for the government to follow. This diarist has come to the conclusion that it was not just the government but SAGE too that failed the country in one of its times of greatest need.

In late July, a House of Common’s committee described the release of 25,000 people from hospitals into care homes in the early weeks of the crisis as an “appalling error”, as individuals were not tested for the virus before they were discharged – even after there was clear evidence of asymptomatic transmission of the virus. The cross-party committee report accused the government of throwing care homes “to the wolves”.

On 24th July Boris Johnson said he took full responsibility for everything that the government did. But he has made no apologies for anything, including the premature deaths of many thousands of the most vulnerable people in society. He claimed at one point that no one knew about asymptomatic transmission but even the most junior virologist would have presumed it to be highly likely.

One of the great “ifs” in all that took place is what if the Prime Minister, his Cabinet, scientific advisers and others, had been rather less complacent in February, taken serious note of what was happening in other countries, read the published papers on the virus and followed the guidance issued by the World Health Organization, particularly the paper COVID-19: what is next for public health? by David L. Heymann and Nahoko Shindo, on behalf of the WHO Scientific and Technical Advisory Group for Infectious Hazards, published on 13th February? If the PM had adopted a common sense strategy back then – and he said on 11th May that it would be the public’s “good solid British common sense” that would see the country through the crisis – who knows how much pain the country might have been spared?

It’s inexplicable that, on 12th January 2020 or soon after, no one in a position of influence – in the Cabinet, in the DHSC, including the chief medical officer, in the various committees such as COBRA, SAGE and NERVTAG – considered it worth suggesting that the threat should be taken seriously and pandemic mitigation and control measures put into immediate effect.

“We’ve had several near misses with these infectious diseases in recent years so let’s go into full defensive mode, ensure that the lessons learned from Operation Cygnus in 2017 are implemented, follow the WHO guidelines, and do everything we can to keep the UK free of this highly infectious and dangerous disease,” someone should, surely, have said. “The worst that can happen if we do this and the disease has no impact here is that we’ll be accused of over-reaction, but if we don’t and the disease takes hold and deaths occur, we will be accused of negligence and gross irresponsibility in facing up to the challenge.”

No one, from the Prime Minister down, comes out of those early stages – and even later ones – with credit. They do stand accused – and are in fact guilty – of negligence, gross irresponsibility and a remarkable degree of complacency, having failed the nation in one of its greatest hours of need. And from then on the situation got steadily worse as those in charge continued to demonstrate an extraordinary level of incompetence and ineptitude.

But let’s get down to the time-scale of events. Some comments have been added by the diarist, mainly in italics, to some of the entries and in the appendices which may, or may not, prove helpful to readers and researchers.