Even as COVID-19 strikes, governments and their health officials remain confident in their ability to respond.

Dr Jenny Harris, England's deputy chief medical officer at the time, praised Britain's preparedness as an "international model" in an early televised news conference.

She's not alone in her thinking - after all, just a year before the pandemic hit, a government review praised our "world-leading capabilities".

But Baroness Hallett said that belief was a "dangerous mistake", setting out the first coronavirus report.

In fact, the UK prepared for the wrong pandemic. How did this happen?

217 pages, over 80,000 wordsBaroness Hallett provides a detailed and scathing critique of how a decade of overconfidence, wasted opportunities and confused thinking led to Britain sleepwalking into a pandemic that claimed more than 200,000 lives and caused Caused lasting damage to the economy and society.

Its roots can be traced to the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It's another virus that's sweeping the world quickly, but the outcome has been mild, in part because older people appear to have some immunity due to previous exposure to similar strains.

Baroness Hallett's report said this had "lulled" the UK into a false sense of security. Two years later, a new pandemic plan was developed. The strategy is not based on trying to vigorously suppress the pandemic virus, but rather on mitigating its inevitable spread, as the impact is believed to be mild.

Since the strategy is based on influenza, the hope is that a vaccine can be deployed quickly while antiviral drugs can be used to reduce the severity of the disease.

But COVID-19 is not the flu, and certainly not a mild flu.

The nine years between 2011 and the start of the pandemic were also filled with missed opportunities.

Britain did not learn from East Asian countries such as Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore. They drew on experience from other coronavirus outbreaks, Mers (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) and Sars (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), to develop plans to rapidly scale up the test and trace system and introduce quarantine processes. Border control measures, including travel restrictions and testing, could also be put in place.

In contrast, the UK abandoned community testing when the coronavirus outbreak hit in spring 2020.

Jeremy Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012 to 2018, even said in this module's evidence that we could even have avoided the first lockdown if we had learned from abroad.

But that’s not to say there weren’t attempts to learn lessons.

A series of training events simulating influenza and coronavirus outbreaks were held in the 2010s to stress-test the UK's preparedness.

An event called Exercise Cygnus in 2016 found worryingly large gaps in the response and plans were set out to update them by 2018.

But this did not happen, and by June 2020, only 8 of the 22 recommendations made following the event had been completed.

The report points out that one reason for the lack of action is the competing demands of Operation Yellowhammer, the UK government’s contingency plan for a no-deal Brexit.

But Britain’s inertia cannot be blamed solely on Brexit. The counter-argument put forward by the previous government was that Brexit would make the UK more flexible in other areas, such as stockpiling medicines and rolling out vaccines.

The way pandemic planning systems are set up is also a factor. Baroness Hallett described a maze of committees, partners and boards responsible for civil contingency planning.

Decentralization also complicates matters by meaning that health policy is the responsibility of each country.

The chart on page 19 of the report speaks louder than words.

To illustrate the complexity of the existing structure, the report uses a spaghetti diagram showing the different boards and agencies responsible for the pandemic. There are over 60 commands with multiple lines.

This means that no one agency is ultimately responsible.

But it’s not just politicians and institutions that make mistakes.

Baroness Hallett's report makes clear that scientists - who were often praised at the start of the pandemic - also have a question that needs to be answered.

She said they had become infected with groupthink - with no one challenging orthodoxy.

The recommendation is too narrowly focused and rarely considers the socio-economic impacts of recommended actions.

Ministers did not do enough to challenge the information they were told, and the various advisory groups were set up in a way that did not allow enough freedom or autonomy to hear different voices, the report said.

This narrow-minded thinking and action is also prevalent in Public Health England, the agency responsible for health protection at the start of the pandemic.

The company's chief executive, Duncan Selbie, told the inquiry he never planned or pushed for the government to set up a large-scale testing system.

This is what Baroness Hallett has concluded, and officials, experts and ministers must all take responsibility for what happened.