Today [Tuesday, 4 March] marks five years since the first person in the North East tested positive for Covid-19.
On the afternoon of Wednesday 4 March, 2020, public health chiefs announced that someone in Newcastle had been confirmed as having the virus and efforts to contain its spread kicked into gear.
Few could have predicted then the speed at which the pandemic would sweep across the nation or the scale of death and devastation that it caused in communities across the globe.
The UK was plunged into lockdown less than three weeks later and coronavirus estimated to have killed more than 232,000 people here.
A month before, Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary had been tasked with treating the first two Covid patients diagnosed in the UK – with a University of York student and one of their relatives moved to Tyneside to be put under the care of specialist medics at the hospital’s High Consequence Infectious Diseases unit.
At the time of the first confirmed case in Newcastle, there had been just 85 nationwide – though experts believe there were likely many, many more that had not been detected.
Professor Eugene Milne, a critical figure on Tyneside during the pandemic as the city’s public health director, remembers how the crisis became “very real, very quickly” and when he became certain of the need for lockdown measures.
While he had received word the night before the 4 March announcement that confirmation of a North East case was imminent, Prof Milne says there had been “an awful lot of preparation going on” for weeks in advance.
The public health expert, who was awarded an MBE in the 2023 New Years Honours, said: “We were very, very conscious of it. We were not passively waiting for it to happen.
“But one of the things that really surprised me looking back is that it felt like at the time that things took place over quite a long period because it was so busy, but actually things changed incredibly quickly during that period.”
Prof Milne became a key public face in the North East during the Covid crisis and says he found it “difficult” to find the right messaging to help the public stay safe at a time when relatively little was known about the virus and when emergency planning for a pandemic had been “very heavily predicated” on it being flu rather than a newly-emerging threat.
He recalled speaking to public health colleagues locally about how restrictions on movement had been used to help contain cases during the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people, and how he became convinced of the need for the UK to enact previously “unthinkable” lockdown measures more than a week before Boris Johnson’s “stay at home” announcement on 23 March.
Prof Milne, who is now retired, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “When I look at the timescale and think about how we went from that first case in Newcastle to a mandatory lockdown on 23 March, it was less than three weeks. That was a really short space of time, but it felt like ages at the time.
“By 11 or 12 March, I thought it had to happen – we had to shut things down in order to prevent services from being overwhelmed. So there was a certain amount of frustration in waiting for those decisions to be taken.
“We had to wait for national decisions to do those things and I think that even if we had the powers to do it at a local level, you have to have consent and understanding. I don’t think anyone had ever thought prior to it that there would be a situation where you have to stay home by law. It was unthinkable one week and then in practice the next.”
Prof Milne says he had spoken with then Newcastle City Council chief executive Pat Ritchie about whether it would be possible to enforce some form of closure measures on Tyneside to help stop the virus’ spread, agreeing at the time local leaders would not have had the power to do so before the Government made its national decision.
He added that he was “incredibly impressed” with how the council itself shifted to remote working and praised the “heroic” staff who stayed on the frontline of social care, bin collections, and other services that required an in-person presence.
But Prof Milne admits that he could never have predicted that lockdown measures would come to dominate life for as long as they did – with three separate national lockdowns imposed in the first year of the pandemic.
He said: “I don’t think we expected it to last as long. Nobody could have known. One of the things we didn’t know was how quickly the virus was going to mutate and what the effects of those mutations were going to be, that really was the big spanner in the works.
“By the same token, we didn’t know how fast vaccines could be generated and that was amazing.”
