Watch our evidence session TODAY at 9:30am on the Management of the Coronavirus Outbreak.

: @CMO_England, Dr Jenny Harries, @JeremyFarrar, @devisridhar, Prof Sir John Bell, Prof Sir Paul Nurse and Prof Jonathan Van-Tam.

: https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/4b2dfc60-0c0e-47fe-8b78-1db2f135a004

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STARTING NOW: Our session on the management of #coronavirus

Welcome to our first panel - Professor Sir John Bell, Professor Sir Paul Nurse, Professor @devisridhar and Professor Sir @JeremyFarrar

Watch live: https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/4b2dfc60-0c0e-47fe-8b78-1db2f135a004

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. @JeremyFarrar says that public health can't just be turned on and off. It needs long-term investment, but has been neglected globally, including in the UK - we let down our guard and didn’t realise the power of infectious diseases

January and February were the two critical months, says @JeremyFarrar. On test and trace he says that we had a limited number of tests, and there was a concern about the level of community transmission - but in hindsight, it was a mistake not to ramp up the number of tests

. @JeremyFarrar tells us he regrets that SAGE was not more blunt and robust in its advice, but that its job was not to hold people to account. Professor Sir Paul Nurse says there has been too much "pass the parcel" and it hasn't always been clear who is in charge of the strategy

For example, Professor Sir Paul Nurse says that the decision to invest in large lighthouse laboratories, thinking that they would be delivered in time to help with the pandemic, was "clearly a big mistake" but says he has "no idea" who made the decision

Professor Sir Paul Nurse says research suggests that up to 45% of healthcare workers were infected during the peak of #coronavirus, yet none of them were being tested, including people without symptoms. "This is a major failure... healthcare workers deserve better"

Professor Sir John Bell agrees: "The failure to address healthcare testing was a major oversight, and one where I'm not entirely sure what the motives were... as the number of cases rose, NHS lab capacity was completely overwhelmed and PHE were totally out of their depth"

It wasn't a novelty to think that we should test healthcare workers, we had already learnt that from other countries, says Sir John Bell - as time went on, there was a suspicion that NHS institutions were avoiding testing so they didn't lose their workforce. That is not ethical.

@devisridhar tells us there was a playbook as to how to control #coronavirus early on - you could already see by February that South Korea was managing the situation by extensive testing and tracing, isolating carriers, face coverings and distancing, travel restrictions

The decision to abandon containment was quite dangerous says @devisridhar, given uncertainty about immunity, long-term health issues - and given we had learnt so much about how you can successfully contain #coronavirus

Lockdowns are very blunt and a measure of last resort, says @devisridhar, and as we've seen in Serbia there have been mass riots. We should be using summer to really push down infections to help us survive winter.