The Sunday Post View: We have to know what happened soon because it could happen again soon

It can be bewildering to throw our minds back and try to remember where we were just 12 months ago.

How so much can have happened in a year when so little happened is a mental tangle that many of us are struggling to unpick. It is not, of course, our only confusion as we seem to rip through the calendar despite every box being blank.

Event piles into event as rollouts follow restrictions chasing lockdowns and the months speed past as days drag by.

And that is just one reason why the charities working to protect the rights of many of Scotland’s most vulnerable people are absolutely right to demand the Scottish government moves urgently to begin an inquiry into the official response to Covid.

The last 12 months have begged many questions – for care home residents, for minorities, for the poor, for the disabled, for all of us – and, so far, the answers have ranged from partial and provisional at best to evasive and non-existent at worst.

Of course, it is wilfully optimistic to expect ministers will rush to install a judge to interrogate the decisions made and policies pursued while there’s a chance of them actually being held accountable for their mistakes but this is not about looking for blame or finding scapegoats. It is too important for that. Our ministers have worked hard and in good faith through the most testing times when they have made some grievous errors and secured some notable successes.

But, simply, we cannot wait for answers. We cannot wait five, eight, 10 years to know what went well and what went wrong. Because, horribly, we could easily be facing another pandemic by then and, terribly, it could be even worse than this one. We need to know what happened soon because it might happen again soon.

After a week when MPs published a scathing verdict on the UK government’s test and trace programme, where marginal gains in slowing the spread of Covid struggle to justify the frankly jaw-dropping £22 billion budget for the first year. However, again, rigorous, judge-led inquiries will not be solely intent on exposing errors. It is more important to identify, detail and emulate the successes; the vaccine programme, for example.

Our governments, from Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson down, need to push the button on public inquiries and begin proper planning on how the most pressing issues will be identified and investigated.

They cannot continue citing the need to prioritise the fight against Covid. The future fight against this pandemic and others will be shaped by what our authorities have learned during the last 12 months. How can we be confident that will happen if those lessons are not detailed and documented?

It has been a harrowing schooling as 10,000 Scots lives were lost but every single one of those deaths demands an explanation, an answer. Every single one demands an inquiry.