The world will suffer another pandemic and it could be “a lot worse” than Covid-19, a former public health official has warned.
Prof Eugene Milne, Newcastle’s former director of public health, says that the world must be prepared for another global health crisis, but fears that some protective measures instituted after coronavirus hit have since been abandoned.
The now-retired public health official was speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) ahead of the fifth anniversary of the North East’s first confirmed case of Covid-19, which was announced on 4 March, 2020 and came just three weeks before the virus’ rapid spread forced the UK into lockdown.
The World Health Organisation reports that more than seven million people have died from Covid, including 232,112 in the UK.
But, reflecting on what lessons must be learned from coronavirus, Prof Milne cautioned that a future pandemic could be even more deadly, comparing it to the Spanish Flu epidemic which killed an estimated 50 million.
He said: “It is worth saying that it will happen again. The history of humankind is that pandemics happen. We don’t know when and don’t know whether it would be similar.
“It could be a lot worse. Going back to 1918-19 [Spanish Flu], there was a much worse impact then on children and young adults than we saw. It was quite a different profile and I think made an impact on the way it was perceived.
“So another one could have quite a different profile next. I think the fact that people will remember it happening in their lifetime will be helpful [if another pandemic happens in that period].
“One of the things I find disappointing is that there were things we started doing in the pandemic that, from a public health point of view, I would have liked to see continue.”
Prof Milne told the LDRS that he would have wanted to see the Lighthouse Lab mass testing centres protected in some form to maintain a “rapid detection and prevention” service.
He added: “A lot of that seemed to be abandoned really quite quickly at the end of the pandemic and I worry a bit about that.
“The fact that Public Health England was abolished [to be replaced by the UK Health Security Agency and Office for Health Improvement and Disparities] in the middle of the pandemic struck me as a bizarre thing to do. Even if you wanted to do that, I would have waited until we were out of that particular crisis. A reorganisation is not the most helpful thing to do in the middle of a national crisis.”
Prof Milne, who was awarded an MBE in 2023, also expressed worries about the long-term impact of Covid-19 on children whose early years were so severely disrupted by lockdown restrictions and for whom the effects could take many years to be realised.
He said: “I think there is, and this is not unique to this pandemic, a desire to move on and put it in the past which is very strong. From what I understand of it, I think it was the same following the Spanish Flu where people wanted to move on and have normality again.
“But the normality we have now is different to what we had before, in subtle ways. How deep that goes is quite difficult to say.
“What worries me enormously is what the impact was on children who grew up during that period. It was a very traumatic time for children and it is likely to have some long-term impacts on them, and we don’t know how extensive that might be.”
