For three weeks the UK Covid Inquiry has been based in Cardiff pouring over how the handling of the virus played put in Wales.
Within days the revelations came pouring out. The collective trauma of that period came flooding back and the embers demanding answers became a roaring fire again.
WalesOnline reported on every single day of the Inquiry including the testimony of Vaughan Gething and Mark Drakeford. Below are the big things we learned for the Covid Inquiry in Wales.
Will Hayward pulls no punches when it comes to scrutinising the decision making of politicians in Wales. You can sign up to his newsletter here to find out what is really going on in Wales.
The Inquiry heard that Wales' cabinet didn't discuss Covid until February 25, 2020. That was more than a month after they were told by chief medical officer (CMO) Frank Atherton that the virus posed a "substantial threat". This was more than three weeks after the UK and Scottish Government's had discussed it on January 31 and February 5 respectively.
Quentin Sandifer, Public Health Wales' lead on Covid-19, said that in late January, he was "starting to get very concerned about... the response from the Welsh Government".
When the cabinet did discuss it, it was part of any-other-business at the end of the meeting. However Vaughan Gething said that this didn't mean it wasn't an important point of discussion with Mark Drakeford adding that a lot of conversations were "happening in corridors".
There is no escaping the fact that the Welsh Government were slow to respond. Messages from officials show them discussing the need to convince Mark Drakeford to get the government on a "war footing" as late as March 16 - just a week before lockdown.
The inescapable impression you got from the three weeks of testimony was that for January, February and some of March was the Welsh Government watched, observed and monitored. As chair Baroness Hallett said multiple times "but what did you do". Once you got through the management speak the answer seem to be that, initially, not a lot.
One fascinating exchange was when Mark Drakeford was being asked about when the Welsh Government refused to cancel the Six Nations game between Wales and Scotland just before the start of lockdown. Mr Drakeford spoke about how he has spoke at a Cobr meeting on March 12 that he didn't believe mass gatherings should go ahead after been told the day before that cancelling them could reduce infection related deaths by 2%.
Mr Drakeford has previously said in his statement that mass gatherings were "an unwelcome distraction" and that it was "confusing" to say people should stay at home but it was okay to "attend the Cheltenham Festival or a concert". He told the inquiry that Boris Johnson overruled him because Dominic Cummings said no.
But it is a hollow criticism when Mr Drakeford didn't follow his own advice and tell the WRU that they should cancel the upcoming game in Wales. We then ended up in a bizarre situation where he is saying that he argued for a UK-wide ban but he didn’t think the advice was there to do it in Wales.
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One of the key reasons that the Welsh Government "watched and waited" through January and February was that they really believed they were prepared for a pandemic because of their preparations for a flu outbreak. But they clearly were not ready. As Mark Drakeford said (after expressing his hatred of military metaphors): "For what we actually faced, we were not as well prepared as we needed to be. For what we thought we face, what we had planned, then it did have a lot of robust elements in it...the enemy we faced was not the enemy we expected.
The Inquiry was clearly concerned that they didn't have access to the WhatsApp messages of senior decision makers in Wales. Jeremy Miles told them he turned on his disappearing messages because his phone had been lost previously and he was worried it could happen again and his private messages might get into the wrong hands. Mr Gething said that his WhatsApps had been lost when he changed phone and he'd been unable to retrieve them. Mark Drakeford said that he had only used WhatsApp 11 times and one of those was to say "thanks".
However Mr Drakeford argued that there was nothing wrong with using WhatsApp and that it was the rule itself that it shouldn't be used for government business was wrong. He argued it was from 2009 and not applicable to the present day. But there is a strong argument for not using WhatsApp to discuss governmental business which can be seen in the next point...
It was clear during the Inquiry is that Special Advisors (SpAds) had a crazy amount of power. At one point there was an exchange between Welsh Government officials where they said that when ministers were away, unelected SpAds would be making the decisions.
The SpAds also gave a really good example of why WhatsApp is a problematic medium for communication. One WhatsApp group of SpAds showed they were formulating key decisions as part of an formal back and forth dialogue. During a Covid outbreak at a meat packing factory on Anglesey one SpAd wrote that the Council leader was asking for Welsh Gov help as she feared the outbreak was spreading significantly. At the same time they were planning to help in North Wales they were also talking about the fact then Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price had to apologise.
The Inquiry were clearly concerned that importing issues were getting missed and not actioned because they are being raised in informal WhatsApps as opposed to formal meetings that are minuted and actioned.
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If part of the point of an inquiry is for the people who have suffered to under understand what decisions were made and why then it has fallen well short when it comes to care homes.
The key contention has always been around the decision not to test people who were discharged from hospital into care settings until several weeks after England. This likely seeded the virus into the most vulnerable place in Welsh society.
Why did this happen? This was certainly a question that the Covid Bereaved Families group was hoping to have answered. Unfortunately they didn't get an answer, they got several, and they were all contradictory.
Counsel to the inquiry also presented several documents suggesting there was evidence in March and April that would have justified testing hospital patients being moved into care homes
The inquiry later heard from a barrister representing John's Campaign, which advocates for people with dementia, that the number of people being moved from hospitals into care homes was fewer than 20 a day in March suggesting a large number of tests would not have been needed
There is another module to come on care settings and given the attention the Inquiry has paid to it so far, this isn;t the last we have seen of this question.
Perhaps nothing underscores the issue of how decision makers can be fed information more than the answer the First Minister gave when questioned about advice from Wales’ chief medical officer Frank Atherton.
Wales took six weeks longer than England to make face masks mandatory on public transport. Mr Drakeford said it was on advice of the Welsh CMO because Mr Atherton was “sceptical” about the merits of face masks, despite drawing from the same scientific research.
Mr Drakeford seemed to imply he supported introducing it but Mr Atherton disagreed fearing it would make people behave in a more risky way. In the end Mr Drakeford didn't want to undermine the CMO and he didn't feel it was right to pick and choose from different sources of advice.
But this throws up a wider debate about the conduits of information to decision makers in emergencies like the pandemic. Wales' response to Covid was very much guided by the individual expertise and opinions of one man. This is no slight on the man in question but it means that the decision makers are getting quite a condensed view of what is a developing evidence base. The chair of the inquiry Baroness Hallett also questioned this asking Mr Drakeford whether his role should not have been to evaluate lots of competing different pieces of advice.
In January 2021, hospitals in Wales were as close as they came to being overwhelmed. There were a huge number of deaths in Wales involving Covid, at a higher rate than anywhere else in the UK.
The cause of this can ultimately be traced back to the Welsh Government's decisions around the firebreak lockdown in late October and early November - as well as the failure to take more decisive action in December when it became clear Covid rates were rising rapidly.
At the time of the firebreak, the Welsh Government presented it as a policy based on sound scientific evidence. Yet the inquiry heard it had already decided the length before asking for modelling work to be done to assess the impact it would have on the virus. It also heard scientists doing that modelling were doing it in the evenings, alongside their day job, and weren't being properly paid.
Mark Drakeford gave emotive reasons for why he didn't want to bring in tougher measures in December. Yet the overwhelming impression was that things could have been handled better.
There is no denying the merits of the questioning barristers or the diligence with which they have pored over the evidence. But this diligence has actually made the case stronger for a Welsh specific inquiry.
In a relatively short amount of the time the Inquiry had winkled out serious shortcomings with the Welsh Government's response. Imagine what could be learned if an inquiry gave Wales its undivided attention.
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