THIS week the prime minister announced Covid Freedom Day – how should we feel?

Firstly, all our thoughts as a country are rightly with Her Majesty this week as we learn that she, too, has the dreaded virus. Thankfully she appears to be doing well, still continuing many duties with typical stoicism.

More widely, even amid the sadness of 160,000 deaths, we can surely feel pride at the way our country came together during the pandemic.

An NHS which found ventilators and beds for every Covid patient that needed them. A vaccine programme that has seen more people boosted than any other large country. Brilliant scientists who have – through the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine – saved more lives in more countries than any others, according to the Economist magazine.

And as we have seen in South West Surrey, an enormous coming together of our wonderful local community with numerous volunteers working hard to make sure people shielding got the supplies they needed.

The government has not got everything right – and as the independent chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee I have not shied away from saying so (although I always try to do so in a non-partisan way).

But whatever mistakes were made in the early part of the pandemic should be balanced against the big call made to pre-buy 400 million doses of vaccine. That decision was made before anyone even knew if those vaccines would work and is ultimately the reason why we have this week become the first big country to end restrictions.

As the prime minister said, we must remain vigilant, particularly for the risk of new variants which will remain with us until we ensure poorer countries have access to the vaccines they need.

But I hope too, as we contemplate a return to normality, we learn important lessons. This is vital as with the growth of international travel and globalisation, Covid-19 is not likely to be the last pandemic of our lifetimes.

The biggest such lesson is that the critical danger zone in any pandemic are those early months when there is no working vaccine.

The question at that stage is not whether or not the NHS can cope, but what life-saving services it has to stop in order to cope. 2020, for example, saw 330,000 fewer cancer referrals in England with 45,000 fewer people starting cancer treatment as a result.

Sadly, many lives were lost – ones that did not show in the statistics because technically they weren’t directly caused by Covid-19.

The NHS has learned many valuable lessons about having clean or ‘green’ sites where elective care can continue uninterrupted, even during a pandemic.

That generally means separating them from busy A&Es where emergency cases arrive in a crisis.

But the capacity of our system is also critical: not just whether we have more doctors and nurses than before, but whether we are training enough for the future given the new risks we face.

The World Health Organisation says there is a global shortage of 2.1 million doctors and 15 million nurses so, unlike in the past, immigration is unlikely to provide the answer.

That is partly why we have nearly 100,000 vacancies in the NHS today – despite my own decision as health secretary to set up five new medical schools and dramatically increase the training places for doctors, nurses and midwives.

But to date the government has rejected my idea that we should have regular independent forecasts to check we are training enough of these increasingly vital professionals.

All the more reason for a detailed select committee inquiry into NHS and social care workforce issues – which, as it happens, starts this coming Tuesday. Tune in!