Hang on, what happened to the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse? We’ve done Plague, Floods and War. Famine must be drumming its hooves against the stable door. Amid all the dark madness, quite understandably, we have lost sight of problems closer to home. 

A reminder came last week when terms of reference were published for the UK Covid inquiry, which is to be chaired this spring by Lady Hallett, the former Court of Appeal judge. At first glance, the remit seems reasonably broad, but I spy some worrying omissions – such as the effect of lockdown on children and young people. As Robert Halfon, chairman of the education select committee, told the Commons, for the Covid inquiry to only investigate restrictions on school attendance was “like calling a mortuary a ‘negative patients output’”.

Already, it seems clear that the Government would prefer to focus on Covid deaths and the Covid “bereaved”, and avoid painful contemplation of the lockdown victims – that is, those whose mental and physical health, livelihoods and education were damaged by actions taken by ministers, scientists, civil servants and the NHS.

It is far too easy for “the pandemic” to become a catch-all scapegoat for human error. Like those infuriating recorded messages you still get whenever you try to see a GP: “Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we are planning on stringing out working from home for as long as possible, because, well, it really suits us, actually, so please try to avoid illness or death where possible. If you must see a doctor, make yourself available in a 4.5-hour window (yes, even if you’ve got a job!), when a GP will eventually call you and tell you there are no appointments until April. But do call 111 instead! Alternatively, you may try the surgery again at 8am tomorrow when you can dial our number 73 times and finally be told all appointments for the day are taken. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we are experiencing high call volumes. To lose the will to live, please press 1…”

Let’s be clear: the virus is not to blame for GPs failing to see their patients. (Doctors in most other countries never stopped face-to-face appointments.) The virus is not responsible for this week’s devastating news that mental health services received a record 4.3 million referrals last year. The Royal College of Psychiatrists calls it “the biggest hit to mental health in generations”.

The virus is not to blame for the fact that a frantic mum I know, whose 10-year-old says he wants to die, has been told the first appointment that CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) can offer her son is in three years’ time. That’s three years, not months. 

Lockdown caused, and continues to cause, all of the above. We are now living with the tragic consequences and any inquiry worth its salt must ask some hard questions of the people who did this to us. How dare they?

Writing in these pages on Monday, Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, said with his infallible cheery complacency: “I wouldn’t want to portray the pandemic response as faultless, but we did all we could and constantly tried to learn lessons as we went on.” It’s big of Matt to admit his pandemic response was not faultless. Some might say that allowing thousands of elderly patients to be turfed out of hospital, without testing them first, and putting them back into care homes where Covid spread like a forest fire among the vulnerable elderly was a teeny bit worse than not quite perfect. Let’s see what Lady Hallett thinks.

Hancock is certainly correct to say that the Left’s rejoicing that Boris bungled the Covid response, doing far worse than comparable countries, is unfounded. As the latest data reveal, the UK had lower excess death rates than most other European countries, and England’s death rate was very marginally lower than in Wales and Scotland, who kept draconian restrictions for longer.

Oddly, what Matt doesn’t mention is that our country has ended up with the longest hospital waiting list in the world and 740,000 missed cancer referrals. So what you might call our collateral-damage death rate may soon be beyond horrifying.