This is The Guardian.

Today, as the COVID inquiry resumes this morning,

here's what we've learned so far.

Before we start, it heads up. If you can believe it in this episode about a public inquiry,

there's a small amount of swearing.

The very first thing that took place was this 20-minute video was played of people who were

affected by COVID in all sorts of different ways.

You know, my son, he was eight. He went to school in September 2021 and a couple of weeks later,

he got COVID for the first time. And our lives changed.

Very much, I think, helps everybody in the room and watching to return it to its core,

that however long and expensive and I can be cumbersome this process is.

It is about, in some ways, honoring the memory of those who died and those who were affected in

different ways. Peter Walker is the Guardian's deputy political editor and he's been following a

public inquiry into how the UK handled COVID-19. We got a phone call from the care home

to say that my mummy was being rushed to hospital. So my mummy had contracted COVID in the care

home and passed away and turned right to anyone. It's not just the fact that my dad died.

It's the hell and the why he died. And that's what I need to have answered. That's what

needs to be addressed. And that's what I hope the inquiry can help do.

Even now, and there's a lot of inquiry still to go, we've had quite a lot of major things. We had

Jeremy Hunt, who was the health secretary for a long time, who basically said in the build-up for

COVID and the years leading up to it, the UK was preparing for the wrong thing. They were preparing

for a pandemic of a flu-type virus. It was an assumption that if there was pandemic flu, it would

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