We had another very constructive "virtual" session of the Science and Technology Committee today, taking evidence from the four Chief Medical Officers of the different nations of the UK.
I asked Professor Chris Whitty, CMO for England and the Government's Chief Medical Adviser, about our initial response to the pandemic. And also whether, *with hindsight* and knowledge of how co-operative the population have been with social distancing and other measures, we might have gone to lockdown earlier.
He gave a very extensive answer which highlighted the huge difficulty in this area - and he also stressed in other answers that we will not be in a position to fully assess each country's response until the end of the pandemic. Even with full hindsight it seems likely that the lockdown date would only have been a matter of a few days earlier.
More generally, I am sympathetic to his general point that there is far too much hindsight being applied to the difficult scientific judgments he and his colleagues had to make.