I was thinking about the care home situation. Moving people from hospitals to care homes made perfect sense given what we knew at the time.

In early March, one of my friends came down with Coronavirus symptoms.

He called the NHS line and was asked:

"Have you been abroad?"

The answer was no. They told him he couldn't have CV.

He went through about 2 weeks of illness, culminating in a couple of days where he couldn't breathe. Subsequently, his employers tested him, and of course he had caught CV.

Why was the NHS advising people that they couldn't have the virus unless they'd been overseas?

Because at that time there were very few cases in the UK and - so it was thought - the only way of catching it was to have been abroad, at that time.

In fact, we're now finding cases in France and suspected cases in the UK going back to December and January.

It is clear that, contrary to what experts thought in February 2020, the disease was already endemic in those Western European cities which were international business hubs .

We had seen what happened in Italy, where hospitals quickly became flooded with sick and infectious patients. It became imperative to move elderly and vulnerable people away from hospitals, and into a care home where they could be protected from infection.

It is highly likely that, at this time, there were elderly people presenting with a cough and breathing problems. Today, we'd assume that was CV. In February, it would have been thought that it was anything but CV: because the view was that you couldn't have caught CV in the UK.

Once such a CV positive person was effectively quarantined in a care home, it spread through that establishment.

The outcome was tragic. It was a result of the mistaken belief that CV was not established in the UK in February.

But it was.