00:00Covid. It's a word that many of us would rather leave in the past.
00:04But the second official report from the Covid public inquiry was released this week,
00:08containing damning reflections on the three lockdowns that threw all of our lives into turmoil.
00:14It depicts a toxic and chaotic downing street, where decision making was unclear, ill-informed and too late.
00:21Swale was one of the areas in Kent with the highest Covid infection rate.
00:25Residents in Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey told me their experiences looking back at the pandemic.
00:31My wife and me, we've been for the whole lockdown time at home, without money even for food.
00:41Fortunately for me, my parents were OK. They didn't catch it or anything like that.
00:46But, yeah, I know it's a sad situation, but for me, it didn't really, it's hard to say it didn't affect me.
00:55Obviously you see the news and that affects you, but work-wise it didn't affect me.
01:00They knew it was coming, but the vaccinations were too far away.
01:03Well, I think it was an unknown, completely unknown from our generation anyway.
01:10The inquiry criticised a toxic and chaotic culture inside Downing Street, calling the decision to go into lockdown too little, too late.
01:18I mean, it really speaks how important it is to be very clear with the public that we don't sugarcoat things, we're not over-optimistic.
01:27It's not about giving people hope or not hope, it's about giving people really, really clear guidance.
01:32I mean, it's shocking that there could have been 23,000 people's lives saved.
01:37These were new experiences, but at the same time, it just points to the sorts of leadership that you need in these situations.
01:44KMTV's resident health expert, Dr Julian Spinks, weighed in.
01:48There'd be no preparation for this. We hadn't had lockdowns before. Nobody knew what to do.
01:52And the effect was it impacted children who, because we closed schools, and people who are vulnerable who didn't have the ability to go out and get their one-hour's exercise or needed to have food delivered by friends or all those sort of things.
02:06Plus, missing the companionship if you're elderly and lonely and you're not allowed to meet with anybody, that has a big impact.
02:14This month marks five years since we entered the second lockdown, and as society moves on from the strangest time in many of our lifetimes, the government now must look back and learn.
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