‘Next pandemic is around the corner,’ expert warns – but would lockdown ever happen again?

Published

1 year ago

March 23, 2024

admin

Exactly four years ago today, Boris Johnson announced the UK’s first COVID lockdown, ordering people to “stay at home”.

Working from home became our reality and people were separated from their loved ones, while frontline workers tackled a new and unknown virus.

With a public inquiry under way into how the UK approached COVID-19, many have criticised when and how we went in and out of lockdowns.

So if another pandemic struck, would we have to lock down again – and how would it be different?

Sky News asks scientists and disaster experts whether we would ever be told to stay at home again, what lockdown measures would involve – and whether the public would comply.

When could a pandemic happen again?

COVID has often been referred to as a “once in a lifetime” event. But with more than six million estimated COVID deaths globally, the last comparable pandemic only emerged four decades ago.

HIV/AIDs was first identified in 1981 and has killed 36 million people worldwide. Prior to that, the Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1968 caused about a million deaths, and the Spanish flu of 1918 50 million.

Scientists warn global warming and deforestation are also making it increasingly likely that a viral or bacterial agent will “jump” from animals to humans and cause another pandemic.

“We’re creating a situation that is rife for outbreaks,” says Dr Nathalie MacDermott, clinical lecturer in infectious diseases at King’s College London.

“I know that COVID was very hard for people and we want to believe we can just go back to normal and I understand that entirely.

“But the next pandemic is around the corner – it might be two years, it could be 20 years, it could be longer – but we can’t afford to let our guards down. We need to stay vigilant, prepared and ready to make sacrifices again.”

Dr MacDermott explains that by cutting down trees in the Amazon and parts of Africa, animals and insects are moving closer to people’s homes.

And with rising temperatures, outbreaks of mosquito and tick-borne viruses such as dengue, chikungunya, and Crimean Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) are happening in parts of Europe rarely seen before.

“As temperatures increase around the world, even the UK will become an area where it’s possible for those types of mosquitoes to live,” she says.

How long would lockdowns last?

While there were three lockdowns in England, each several months long, Professor Stephen Griffin, virologist at the University of Leeds, argues there should have “only ever been one”.

“Lockdown was an extreme reaction to a situation that had already got out of control,” he says.

But if there was investment in mitigations like air ventilation in public buildings and generic vaccines and antiviral drugs that could be adapted at speed, he argues, lockdowns would be shorter and less severe.

Dr MacDermott says that until the government, scientists and healthcare workers know more about an emerging virus and how it spreads, “a lockdown would be inevitable to some degree”.

Professor Adam Kucharski, co-director of the Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Response at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that if you can’t contain severe infections and eliminate them completely – like Ebola in Africa and SARS-1 in East Asia – the only way to prevent a large disease epidemic is by heavily reducing transmission until a vaccine or treatment make the population less susceptible.

In the UK, it was eight months before the first COVID vaccine was administered and more than a year before it was rolled out more widely.

Would we be banned from socialising – and would schools shut?

Professor Lucy Easthope, expert in mass fatalities and pandemics at the University of Bath, says she would want to see what she calls a “nuanced quarantine”.

“Lockdown is never a word I would have used – it’s only really associated with things like school shootings,” she says.

With regards to restrictions on socialising, she stresses how important “community and connection” are for disaster planning.

The 2016 UK flu plan says public gatherings are “an important indicator of normality” and that “there is little direct evidence of the benefits of cancelling such events”.

Immediately authorities should prioritise creating “large ventilated safe spaces” for children, pregnant women, and vulnerable people, she says.

This would involve places like cinemas, leisure centres, and town halls being repurposed as community centres.

She adds the importance of people having a “purpose”, so being able to meet people socially outside should be allowed as soon as the nature of the virus is clear.

Similarly, pubs, bars, cafes, and restaurants should be allowed to open outdoors as soon as possible, she says.

While the flu plan does advise schools in infected areas to shut, contingency measures have been suggested for temporary marquees to host lessons – or just spaces for children to go.

“Lots of children don’t have gardens, so organised ways of getting them outside is important,” Professor Easthope says.

“For the marquees for education, you might expect to see three or four schools consolidated together.”

Another ‘pingdemic’?

The government spent billions on its test and trace system, which included testing centres, the coronavirus helpline, manual contact tracing by what was then Public Health England, and the NHS COVID app.

While rapid tests are important to stop people spreading the virus further, and the app “had a lot of promise”, more innovative digital contact tracing may be required to avoid us relying on another lockdown, Professor Kucharski says.

“The pingdemic was to some extent the NHS app doing what it was designed to do,” he says.

“But with the digital contact tracing infrastructure that some Asian countries had, you can limit disruption to those people at higher risk in a particular outbreak rather than reverting to blanket measures.”

He cautions that it would require “hard conversations” around privacy, but options include using smartphone location and debit card transactions to link people to identified cases.

In some countries, leaving quarantine would see people’s phones automatically notify tracers of potential further spread.

Would the public comply?

When public health experts gave evidence to the COVID inquiry last year, they said they were wrong to assume the public would soon tire of a lockdown and suffer “behavioural fatigue”.

Social psychologist and crowd behaviour expert Chris Cocking says it was a lack of trust in government that caused compliance rates to fall – not simply getting “tired” of restrictions.

“The overall message should be positive,” the principal lecturer at the University of Brighton says. “Because if another situation arose, where it became necessary, people would comply.”

He says if another lockdown was needed, the current Tory government would either have to minimise scandals over their own rule-breaking – or change hands completely to keep the public on board.

He adds: “If we had a new government, people would be far more likely to have faith in them because they would be less likely to say, ‘it’s the same bunch as before – why should we do it again?’

“And if they put more effort into not having situations like ‘Partygate’ or Dominic Cummings driving to Barnard Castle, they could appeal to the public’s shared sense of identity, and it would be possible for compliance rates to remain relatively high.”

From COVID fines to arrests made during Black Lives Matter protests and the Sarah Everard vigil, Professor Easthope describes lockdown legislation as “definitely bad” and “cruelly applied”.

Mr Cocking argues lockdown laws are largely irrelevant to people’s decision to adhere to restrictions or not.

“It’s not the laws in place, it’s whether people psychologically identify with the need to comply,” he says.

And for people who don’t, engaging with different groups is important to avoid a mass movement of “lockdown sceptics”.

“People might feel unable to comply with restrictions for lots of different reasons. But it’s a real mistake to lump them all together because you then identify them all as part of the same group, which further alienates them from the authorities,” Mr Cocking adds.

Would we be well enough prepared?

Four years before COVID, the UK had carried out secret pandemic preparedness exercises for both flu and coronavirus outbreaks.

A detailed report on the flu exercise was compiled, but public health officials have told the COVID inquiry that the coronavirus drill wasn’t acted on.

According to Professors Kucharski and Easthope, the more extensive flu plan could be easily adapted.

“The separation of a flu plan from a coronavirus plan is nonsense,” Professor Kucharski says.

“The characteristics of COVID were a lot like the sort of infection in a flu pandemic. It should have been a wider discussion about what the acceptable outcome was from the horrendous trade-offs we were going to have to make.”

Professor Easthope says in the late 2010s, she and other emergency planners identified holes in infrastructure that meant the UK “wasn’t ready for even a relatively manageable pandemic” in terms of health and social care. She also says stockpiles of PPE “failed” in 2017.

But she says the internet’s capacity to cope with so many processes moving online is both “enabling and unifying”.

“We just didn’t know how well it would perform, but in the end, it was one of the reasons we didn’t fall apart completely,” she says.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told Sky News: “Throughout the pandemic, the government acted to save lives and livelihoods, prevent the NHS being overwhelmed and deliver a world-leading vaccine rollout which protected millions of lives across the nation.

“We have always said there are lessons to be learnt from the pandemic and we are committed to learning from the COVID-19 inquiry’s findings which will play a key role in informing the government’s planning and preparations for the future. We will consider all recommendations made to the department in full.”

UK

Peter Sullivan who has spent 38 years in jail for murder has conviction quashed

Published

15 hours ago

May 13, 2025

admin

Peter Sullivan who has spent 38 years in jail for murder has conviction quashed

A man who has spent 38 years in prison for murder has had his conviction quashed – but insisted he is “not angry” or “bitter”.

The Court of Appeal ruling in the case of Peter Sullivan ends what’s thought to be the longest-running miscarriage of justice in British history.

He was found guilty of the 1986 murder of 21-year-old Diane Sindall, who had been beaten, raped and left in an alleyway in Bebington, Merseyside.

Mr Sullivan – who was jailed in 1987 – had always maintained his innocence and first tried to challenge his conviction in 2016, but the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) declined to refer the case, and he lost his own appeal bid in 2019.

Two years later, he again asked the CCRC to refer his case and new tests, ordered by the commission, revealed Mr Sullivan’s DNA was not present on samples preserved at the time.

At a hearing on Tuesday, lawyers for Mr Sullivan told the Court of Appeal in London that the new evidence showed that Ms Sindall’s killer “was not the defendant”.

Mr Sullivan attended the hearing via video link from HMP Wakefield, listening to his conviction being quashed with his head down and arms folded before appearing to weep and putting his hand to his mouth.

A relative in court also wept as the judgment was read out.

‘The truth shall set you free’

In a statement following the ruling, Mr Sullivan – now 68 – said: “I lost my liberty four decades ago over a crime I did not commit.

“What happened to me was very wrong, but does not detract that what happened… was a heinous and most terrible loss of life.”

He added: “It is said the truth shall set you free. It is unfortunate that it does not give a timescale as we advance towards resolving the wrongs done to me.

“I am not angry, I am not bitter.

“I am simply anxious to return to my loved ones and family as I’ve got to make the most of what is left of the existence I am granted in this world.”

Outside court, Mr Sullivan’s sister Kim Smith said she was “ecstatic” at seeing her brother’s conviction quashed.

She told reporters: “We lost Peter for 39 years and at the end of the day, it’s not just us; Peter hasn’t won, and neither has the Sindall family. They’ve lost their daughter, they are not going to get her back.

“We’ve got Peter back and now we’ve got to try and build a life around him again. We feel sorry for the Sindalls and it’s such a shame this has had to happen in the first place.”

Barristers for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said the DNA evidence was “sufficient fundamentally to cast doubt on the safety of the conviction” and that there was “no credible basis on which the appeal can be opposed”.

Lord Justice Holroyde, sitting with Mr Justice Goss and Mr Justice Bryan, said in light of the new DNA evidence “it is impossible to regard the appellant’s conviction as safe” as he quashed the conviction.

Hunt for DNA match

Merseyside Police has confirmed detectives are now “carrying out an extensive investigation in a bid to identify who the new DNA profile belongs to, as to date there is no match on the national DNA database”.

Detectives are also contacting individuals identified in the original investigation to request voluntary DNA samples.

That initial investigation was the largest in the force’s history and, for many officers, the “frenzied” nature of the attack made it the worst case they had ever encountered.

Ms Sindall, who was engaged to be married, had just left her shift as a part-time barmaid at a pub in Bebington when her small blue van ran out of petrol.

She was walking to an all-night garage when she was attacked.

Mr Sullivan, who was 29 at the time and described as a loner, initially denied the attack but later signed a confession.

Questions have since been raised about whether he had proper legal representation during police interviews. Evidence related to bite marks on Ms Sindall’s body, considered crucial at the trial, has also since been called into question.

At the time of Mr Sullivan’s trial in 1987, DNA technology was not available and subsequent requests for new tests had been refused.

‘Nobody felt safe’

On the grass verge close to where Ms Sindall’s body was found, a memorial stone has been placed in memory of her and “and all of our sisters who have been raped and murdered”.

Her murder sent a chill through the community and led to the creation of the Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre on Merseyside. “Nobody felt safe, it was a very scary time,” said the centre’s Jo Wood.

She says the uncertainty has resurfaced. “There’s someone out who killed Diane Sindall,” said solicitor Ms Myatt.

“The biggest fear we’ve got is of the unknown and now we’ve got an unknown. We don’t know who it might be. Who knows who this person is? Are we going to encounter him?

“We might have encountered him, we don’t know, we just know that he’s out there.”

Ms Sindall’s family told Sky News they did not want to comment on the case.

Mel John, landlord of the pub where Ms Sindall worked on the night of her death, said: “I’m glad he’s being released if he’s innocent. It has been a long time.”

Mr Sullivan is also aware, his solicitor says, of the impact on Ms Sindall’s family.

“We are very sensitive and respectful to the fact that there is a victim, Diane Sindall and her family, that will be affected by this process,” the solicitor said.

UK

Tory MP Patrick Spencer charged with sexual assaults at Groucho Club

Published

15 hours ago

May 13, 2025

admin

Tory MP Patrick Spencer charged with sexual assaults at Groucho Club

Tory MP Patrick Spencer has been charged with two counts of sexual assault at London’s Groucho Club.

The charges follow two alleged incidents involving two different women at the private members’ club, in Soho, in August 2023, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said.

Follow live politics updates: Your views on Starmer’s migration speech

Mr Spencer – who is the Conservative MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich – will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Monday 16 June.

A Conservative Party spokesman said Mr Spencer, 37, has been suspended by the Tories and had the whip withdrawn.

The Metropolitan Police said he was charged after attending a voluntary interview at a London police station on 13 March this year.

Frank Ferguson, head of the CPS special crime and counter terrorism division, said: “Following a review of the evidence provided by the Metropolitan Police Service, we have authorised two counts of sexual assault against Patrick Spencer MP.

“The charges follow two alleged incidents involving two separate women at the Groucho Club in central London in August 2023.

“The Crown Prosecution Service reminds all concerned that criminal proceedings against this defendant are now active and that he has the right to a fair trial.

“It is extremely important that there should be no reporting, commentary or sharing of information online which could in any way prejudice these proceedings.”

Mr Spencer was first elected to Parliament last year with a majority of 4,290.

It is understood he was asked not to attend the parliamentary estate by the Tory chief whip while police enquiries were ongoing.

A Conservative Party spokesman said: “The Conservative Party believes in integrity and high standards. We have taken immediate action.

“Patrick Spencer MP has been suspended from the Conservative Party, and the whip withdrawn, with immediate effect.

“The Conservative Party cannot comment further on an ongoing legal case.”

The Groucho Club, in Dean Street, opened in 1985 and became a renowned meeting place for A-list celebrities and others, including actors, comedians and media executives.

The club was named after the comedian and actor Groucho Marx, who reportedly once said he would refuse to join any club that would have him as a member.

It was originally set up as a more relaxed alternative to traditional gentlemen’s clubs, according to the venue’s website, which adds that members should be in the creative industry “and share the club’s maverick spirit”.

Before becoming an MP, Mr Spencer worked in finance for private equity firm IPGL, a company chaired by his father, former Conservative Party treasurer Lord Michael Spencer.

He later took a job at the Centre for Social Justice think thank before becoming a senior adviser at the Department for Education.

He made his maiden speech in the Commons in July last year during a debate on the MPs’ code of conduct relating to second jobs, during which he said the “most important thing to the people across my constituency” was “restoring a sense of moral probity and public spiritedness to our political system”.

Sky News has contacted Mr Spencer for comment.

UK

Man arrested over arson attacks after fire at Sir Keir Starmer’s house

Published

21 hours ago

May 13, 2025

admin

Man arrested over arson attacks after fire at Sir Keir Starmer's house

A 21-year-old man has been arrested over a series of arson attacks, police have said, after a fire at a house owned by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

The suspect was arrested in the early hours of Tuesday on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life, according to the Metropolitan Police.

He remains in custody.

Emergency services were called to fires at the doors of two homes in north London within 24 hours of each other – one just after 1.35am on Monday in Kentish Town and the other on Sunday in Islington. Both properties are linked to Sir Keir.

Detectives were also checking a vehicle fire last Thursday on the same street as the Kentish Town property to see whether it is connected.

Part of the area was cordoned off as police and London Fire Brigade (LFB) investigators examined the scene.

Neighbours described hearing a loud bang and said police officers were looking for a projectile.

The prime minister is understood to still own the home, which was damaged by fire on Monday, but nobody was hurt. Pictures showed scorching at the entrance to the property.

Sir Keir used to live there before he and his family moved into 10 Downing Street after Labour won last year’s general election. It is believed the property is being rented out.

In the early hours of Sunday, firefighters dealt with a small fire at the front door of a house converted into flats in nearby Islington, which is also linked to the prime minister.

In a statement, police said: “As a precaution and due to the property having previous connections with a high-profile public figure, officers from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command are leading the investigation into this fire.

“Enquiries are ongoing to establish what caused it. All three fires are being treated as suspicious at this time, and enquiries remain ongoing.”

The prime minister’s official spokesman said: “I can only say that the prime minister thanks the emergency services for their work and it is subject to a live investigation. So I can’t comment any further.”

Kemi Badenoch has condemned the suspected arson attacks.

Writing on X, the Conservative leader said: “This is a shocking incident. My thoughts are with the prime minister and his family. No one should face these sorts of threats, let alone people in public service.

“It’s an attack on our democracy and must never be tolerated.”

Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick told Sky News on Tuesday: “It’s important that the prime minister and anyone in public life has their family, their homes, protected.

“It is absolutely wrong, disgraceful, for any individual to take the kind of action that we saw against the prime minister’s home.”