‘Next pandemic is around the corner,’ expert warns – but would lockdown ever happen again?
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.
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Boris Johnson’s 23 March 2020 statement in full
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.
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Day 1: Life under lockdown
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.
Pic: PA
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.
Outdoor dining pods at a restaurant in Cambridgeshire in 2020. Pic: PA
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”.
Authorities should immediately 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.
A school closed on 24 March 2020 in Knutsford, Cheshire. Pic: PA
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 from spreading the virus further, and the app “had a lot of promise”, more innovative digital contact tracing may be required to avoid 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.
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March 2020: Sky News speaks to people about life under lockdown in Sheffield
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 be likely to comply.”
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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.”
COVID national memorial wall in London. Pic: PA
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”.
Dr 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 each reason individually is important to avoid creating 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,” Dr 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.
A flu pandemic plan was compiled after Exercise Cygnus in 2016. Pic: Cabinet Office
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.”
Read more:
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How widespread is COVID now?
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.”
One of the country’s leading hospitals has been accused of covering up concerns about a surgeon made a decade before she was eventually suspended.
Kuldeep Stohr was suspended from Addenbrooke’s Hospital in January this year after a review found issues with some of her surgeries – with the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) later saying it was reviewing the care of 800 patients.
A joint investigation by Sky News and The Sunday Times found the trust may have downplayed previous concerns, with a report identifying issues with Ms Stohr back in 2016.
A senior source at the hospital said children were “severely permanently harmed”, and “some of the cases are horrendous”. They said the damage could have been avoided and told Sky News there was “the impression of a cover up”.
Kuldeep Stohr was suspended in January this year
In one case, a child injured in a car accident was left with a broken arm for 11 days after Ms Stohr failed to spot it.
Concerns were first raised in 2015, with the CUH commissioning an external expert to examine several of Ms Stohr’s patients and their treatment.
A letter shared between staff at the time – and seen by Sky News – says the trust was satisfied the report did not raise any concerns.
But a copy of the report, obtained by Sky News and The Sunday Times, shows it did identify “technical issues” with the surgeries of multiple patients.
Now questions are being asked about why the hospital didn’t act sooner.
Ms Stohr allegedly told Oliver’s family to leave his care “in the hands of God”
One patient, whose son was treated by the surgeon in 2018, says she is “angry” she was not listened to at the time after she raised concerns about Ms Stohr’s conduct.
Ms Stohr said: “I always strive to provide the highest standards of care to all my patients. I am cooperating fully with the trust investigation and it would not be appropriate to comment further at this time.”
Dr Susan Broster, chief medical officer at Cambridge University Hospitals said the trust “apologise unreservedly to all the patients and families we have let down”.
She added that patients who were considered in the 2016 report also form part of the latest clinical review: “We have spoken to those patients and families and offered to meet them in person.”
It is not clear if those patients were contacted at the time of the first report.
‘Some of the cases are horrendous’
A source at the hospital said the damage was “all avoidable” while “the lives of children and families have been ruined”.
“Stohr destroyed people’s lives by performing very poor surgery. She destroyed some hip joints,” they said.
The confidential report was written in 2016
But they said staff felt they were “bullied and intimidated when they tried to raise concerns”, and were told the initial 2016 report showed no issues with Ms Stohr.
“I consider that these cases have been properly investigated and am reassured that there is no concern about Kuldeep’s practice,” said a letter sent to staff from the trust in 2016.
“I have the impression there has been a cover up,” the source told Sky News.
Dr Broster, from the CUH, said the trust had commissioned Verita, a specialist investigations company, to carry out an independent investigation to see if issues could have been addressed sooner – but added that it would be inappropriate to comment further while the review was ongoing.
She said the trust would publish the findings of the Verita report and said it was “committed to implementing the findings and recommendations in full”, with the initial findings expected by the autumn.
‘Technical errors’: What the 2016 report said
The doctor who authored the 2016 report wrote he had “some anxieties about the technical aspects” of one patient’s operation.
He highlighted “technical error[s]” on several other operations.
The report author wrote he had “some anxieties” about one surgery
Some patients were “difficult cases” where “decision making was broadly correct”, and issues were not found with each one.
On one patient, the report said an issue that arose was a “known complication and does not indicate poor care. These were difficult hips”.
The report also cited a “divided apartment of paediatric orthopaedics” in which “discussion of difficult cases and mutual support does not exist”.
But the report did say Ms Stohr did not always order CT scans after operations took place.
It said all cases of DDH (Developmental Dysplasia of the Hip) surgery should have an MRI or CT scan after the operation had been completed.
The report found “issues” with some of the surgeries
Two reports, nine years apart
Ms Stohr was suspended this year with a 2025 report highlighting similar concerns, including around post-op imaging.
The 2025 findings said one procedure – a pelvic osteotomy, where the pelvic bone is cut and reshaped to improve the alignment of the hip joint – was one “Ms Stohr appears to find difficult”.
It also raised concerns that Ms Stohr “frequently operates on her own”, or with more junior members of staff.
“There have clearly been cases when technical issues arose during surgery where the presence of a consultant colleague may have been helpful,” the latest report said.
It also said the lack of imaging at the end of procedures “is inexplicable and not the standard of care”.
Catherine Slattery, senior associate at Irwin Mitchell who is representing some of the affected families, said both reports showed “similar themes”.
“Clearly things have got much worse in 2025. So, the question is, what could have been done in 2016 to have prevented this from happening?” she said.
Catherine Slattery is representing a number of families affected
Issues, such as Ms Stohr not ordering bone scans, were “very strange”, she added.
“But if we take the individual out, why has nobody else noticed that every other surgeon in the team has been ordering scans, but one person hasn’t?”
But she said the trust has “been playing catch up”: “[It] only seems to be taking steps when they are being prompted to do so by people like me, or journalists, or other people asking difficult questions – or even the local MP having to ask difficult questions.”
‘Leave it in the hands of God’
Seven-year-old Oliver Muhlhausen has constant foot pain – and it’s getting worse.
He was born with a severe deformity which Ms Stohr said didn’t need to be operated on.
Oliver has been left in constant agony after Ms Stohr refused to operate on him
Oliver was seen by the specialist surgeon in 2018, but his mother, Nicola, claims she was told: “There is no operation within my remits or that I can or am willing to perform, go away and leave it in the hands of God.”
The family eventually sought a second opinion, moving to be treated at a different hospital, but said Oliver has been left in “constant agony”.
“I’ve been told that if she had done something sooner or even attempted to do something sooner then he probably would have stood a bit better chance than what he’s currently going through.”
Nicola said she “upset and angry” at not being listened to, especially considering concerns were raised internally two years before her son became a patient of Ms Stohr.
“I cannot understand why something was not done sooner, because clearly there were issues,” she said, adding that hospital staff “need to be held accountable”.
Oliver and his mother, Nicola
She filed a formal complaint in 2019 but said this was “brushed under the carpet”.
In response to her complaint at the time, the trust said Ms Stohr “would like to apologise unreservedly for her failures of clear communication”.
‘Life could be different now’
Ellise Kingsley is now 24 and cannot walk for long periods of time – she is left in daily pain and distress.
She is not one of the 800 cases currently being examined by the CUH but was operated on by Ms Stohr in 2012 and 2016.
She said, had the 2016 report been acted on, life could be very different for her now.
“It is upsetting to think that I could have had a completely different lifestyle as such in the last ten years,” she said.
Ellise Kingsley was operated on by Ms Stohr twice
“I wouldn’t have had to even think about my foot now at 24.
“It stresses me out actually to think that there was a chance for change, but change didn’t happen.”
Pippa Heylings, MP for South Cambridgeshire, said it was an “anxious and distressing time for all involved”, and called on Addenbrooke’s Hospital to be “open and transparent” as well as independent.
She said: “The hospital cannot be seen to be marking its own homework. It is crucial for all to come forward with relevant information and evidence including whistleblowers with no fear of consequence or retaliation.”
The CUH said it has set up a dedicated Patient and Family Liaison Team, and encourages anyone concerned about their care to call the dedicated helpline on 0808 175 6331 or email CUH.helpline@nhs.net.
The government is set to roll out sweeping reforms to the immigration system.
The skilled visa threshold will be raised to require a graduate qualification and a higher salary threshold, under plans outlined in an immigration white paper that will be presented in parliament on Monday.
For jobs below this level, access to the immigration system will be “time-limited” and only granted if there are shortages “critical to the industrial strategy”.
Strategies to increase domestic skills and recruitment would also need to be drawn up, with a labour market evidence group set to be established to identify sectors “overly reliant on overseas labour”.
Under the plans to reduce net migration to the UK, employers will be told that they must train workers in the UK rather than turn to immigration to solve labour shortages.
Net migration – the difference between the number of people immigrating and emigrating to a country – soared when the UK left the EU in January 2020.
It reached 903,000 in the year to June 2023 before falling to 728,000 in mid-2024.
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Has Labour tackled migration?
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has blamed overseas recruitment for the rise in net migration over the last four years after Labour inherited a “failed” immigration system from the previous government.
“Migration must be properly controlled and managed so the system is fair,” Ms Cooper said.
Read more on immigration:
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‘Migrant hub’ plan will send alarm bells clanging
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Lack of UK training ‘big driver of net migration’ says Ms Cooper
Ms Cooper added: “Overseas recruitment soared at the same time as big increases in the number of people not working or in education here in the UK.
“The last government lost control of the immigration system and there was no proper plan to tackle skills shortages here at home.
“Under our Plan for Change, we are taking decisive action to restore control and order to the immigration system, raise domestic training and skills, and bring down net migration while promoting economic growth.”
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Meanwhile, the Conservatives will try to force a vote in parliament on capping the number of non-visitor visas that can be issued.
The party is trying to amend the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, which if accepted would give the government the power to cap visas in line with the country’s needs, and allow them to be revoked if the limit is exceeded.
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Is UK net migration falling or rising?
The Tories are also behind a separate amendment to the same bill which would look to disapply the Human Rights Act in asylum and deportation cases.
Responding to the government’s white paper, shadow home secretary Chris Philp said “fixing Britain’s migration crisis requires a new radical approach. Labour had the opportunity to do this and have failed”.
He added: “If Labour were serious about immigration, they’d back our binding immigration cap and back our plan to repeal the entire Human Rights Act from immigration matters. But they have got no grip, no guts and no plan.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, shadow home secretary Chris Philp and Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice will be among the guests on Sky News’ Trevor Phillips on Sunday show from 8.30am today.
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