‘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.”
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
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:
Doctors suing NHS over long COVID
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.”
UK
Reeves should be wary of expecting surprise inflation good news to last – with tax rises yet to bite and Trump tariffs ahead
A fall in December’s CPI inflation of 0.1 percentage points to 2.5% is marginal, but by being below expectations it delivered an above-expectations boost to Rachel Reeves.
The chancellor has been under intense scrutiny for the last week as UK borrowing costs have risen (in line with US and European peers) and the value of the pound has fallen.
While this has presented a political headache rather than the economic crisis presented by the opposition, it is no less real for a government that has made growth, stability and fiscal probity a priority.
Money blog:
What inflation drop means for you and economy
Strikingly the moves against the UK came unprompted by any fresh data to trigger a lack of confidence in the bond and currency markets.
This week that changes, with December’s inflation figures today followed on Thursday by GDP numbers for November.
In that context, this morning’s surprise on the upside will have been welcomed at the Treasury, particularly when the underlying numbers are analysed.
Good news from underlying figures
Core inflation, which strips out fuel and other volatile elements, fell to 3.2% from 3.5% in November, and services inflation, a key metric for the Bank of England‘s calculations, dropped 0.6% in the month to 4.4%.
Both of those falls were larger than consensus expectations and may be a sign that the ‘sticky’ inflation the Bank has consistently warned is staying its hand may be falling back.
The markets appear to think so, with expectations of a rate cut at the next Monetary Policy Committee meeting on 6 February increasing from 62% before publication, to 83% 90 minutes later.
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Sky’s Kay Burley speaks with chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones about the inflation figures
Warning uplift could be temporary
Borrowing costs also eased in light of the figures, with the 10 and 30-year gilt yields, which have seen 16 and 28-year highs respectively in the last week, falling back as markets opened.
If that suggests a measure of perspective returning to the UK, the chancellor still faces genuine challenges.
With the cost of servicing debt elevated, her fiscal rules remain in peril, and difficult decisions on spending will follow if they bust the OBR spreadsheet in March. And she cannot evade responsibility for loading £25bn of employment taxes on business without demonstrating that it will not, as many claim, depress growth.
In a note this morning, Pantheon Economics said it expects those measures to erase today’s good news on inflation.
The economic intelligence firm said: “Looking ahead, we expect headline inflation to rise to 2.8% in January, and then 3.2% in April as energy deflation eases, as a range of government administered and inflation-indexed prices rise and underlying services inflation persists.”
What next?
Ms Reeves will spend the next three weeks making the case for her economic plan, with a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos next week followed by a speech on growth at the end of the month, and further staging posts in the industrial strategy, similar to the AI announcement this week.
All of which may reassure the world about Britain’s prospects, but still may not be enough.
US inflation figures, published later on Wednesday, are expected to show an increase, which may push yields up further.
And in five days Donald Trump will be in a position to begin implementing trade and tariff policies which are expected to be inflationary.
If the last week has demonstrated anything, it is that the US exerts a gravitational pull on markets the UK cannot escape.
“Have you ever thought about going on ‘the pen’?” My friend texts me.
I’m in bed, doomscrolling and my social media feed is full of hot takes about Ozempic. Insanely beautiful and glossy people are telling me why I should or shouldn’t take weight loss drugs.
Warning: This article contains details of body image and weight loss that some people might find distressing
Normally in January, everyone is talking about who’s going sober or trying (and failing) the latest viral health challenge.
But this year the hot topic is “who’s going on the pen?” – the weekly injection that is now widely used for weight loss.
There’s no denying that 2024 was a breakthrough year for weight loss drugs. Boris Johnson and Elon Musk are just a few of the celebrities who have announced they have taken it.
Elon Musk says he has taken weight loss drugs
Robbie Williams even made headlines joking he’d lost his “arse” due to Ozempic. “Now it just looks like the place where you put a credit card,” he quipped.
It’s not just celebrities and TikTok creators jumping on the weight loss drug hype. According to Simple Online Pharmacy, more than 500,000 people in the UK are now taking one of the few weight loss drugs, with experts predicting a nationwide fall in obesity rates as a result.
Even friends who didn’t seem like they would meet the medical criteria for the drugs were tempted. And I can’t lie, so was I. What happened to body positivity, I wondered, as I typed ‘How to buy weight loss drugs’ into my phone.
‘Ozempic changed my life’
Marketed as Ozempic, Wegovy or Saxenda, these drugs are administered via a weekly injection that mimics GLP-1 – a hormone that helps regulate hunger and slow digestion. It is only available with a prescription and online pharmacies have certain checks to ensure you meet the criteria.
Depending on your weight, some weight loss drugs can be approved for use alongside exercise and diet to manage weight loss – if your Body Mass Index is 30, or you have a BMI of 27 and above but have pre-existing medical conditions.
For people who medically qualify for this drug, it can be life-changing. Helping with weight loss and reducing the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and heart failure. The UK government is even proposing to use weight loss drugs to help tackle obesity and get people back to work.
Meranda said the medication changed her life
Meranda, a law firm administrator, lives in New York. After seeing celebrities using Ozempic, she went to her doctor and asked for the drug. Now, she has lost over eight stone and counting.
She was always an “active fat person”, she explained, but “never considered weight loss before”. “Ozempic totally changed my life,” she said, her smile radiating through the video chat.
But what happens when a drug that can be transformative for the people who need it, ends up in the hands of someone that doesn’t?
‘I started going in and out of fainting’
A simple internet search revealed a raft of online pharmacies advertising the drugs, including Superdrug and Simple Online Pharmacy.
I filled in some personal details and my health history. Then it asked for some pictures to verify my weight. I didn’t meet the BMI criteria, so I increased my weight on the form. Then I uploaded my pictures and pressed submit.
A couple of days later, I was approved by both online pharmacies.
I was genuinely surprised. It seemed pretty quick, considering I only submitted my application a couple of days ago.
If I could get my hands on it that easily, I wondered how many other people were taking it under the radar without the right supervision.
If you take the drug without being prescribed it, the side effects can be brutal.
Dr Vicky Price is seeing the effects of the drugs in A&E
Consultant Vicky Price has seen it first-hand.
A consultant in Liverpool A&E, she has dealt with patients who’ve got the drug from online pharmacies after “not being truthful about their weight because they’re so desperate”.
At first, Dr Price said these cases were rare but then as the year progressed, numbers started rising, until it felt like she was seeing someone in that position almost every shift.
The symptoms they exhibited ranged from vomiting and diarrhoea to feeling lethargic and being dehydrated. Some even appear to have gone into a “starvation process”.
Many were put on IV fluids for days.
What did all of them have in common? Dr Price said none of them were obese.
Laura* knows what it’s like to have an adverse reaction to weight loss drugs.
Getting weight loss drugs online is easier than it should be
After hearing about celebrities and friends using them with success, she decided to try it. At first, she experienced no side effects but then one night at work on a night shift, she started to feel “dizzy, clammy and shaky”.
After trying to eat something she started “vomiting and going in and out of fainting”. She ended up in A&E, on a drip and felt “terrified”.
Changing the rules
I spoke to Superdrug and Simple Online Pharmacy and asked them why I was able to lie about my weight and be approved for Wegovy.
Superdrug said: “The safety and well-being of patients remain our top priority… all medical consultations between a patient and healthcare professionals relies on the integrity and honesty of patients.”
Prescribing protocols are “regularly reviewed and new measures are implemented where required to continue to strengthen the integrity of these services”, the firm added.
Since my prescription was approved Superdrug has introduced “enhanced assessments” and will require new patients to submit three date-verified photographs.
Simple Online Pharmacy said: “We take clinical care very seriously and have numerous checks and protocols in place for prescribing.”
The pharmacy is carrying out a full review into my case and says it “constantly” seeks to enhance its ability to “identify falsified patient information”.
After taking these findings to the pharmacy regulator, the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC), it confirmed it is following up with the pharmacies involved.
The GPhC publishes guidance “specifically for the safe and effective provision of pharmacy services at a distance which we expect online pharmacies to follow”.
“We are issuing an updated version of our guidance shortly, which will set out additional safeguards around medicines used for weight management,” it added.
Novo Nordisk, the company behind Ozempic, Wegovy and Saxenda, made it clear it does not “promote, suggest or encourage the use of any of our medications outside of their approved labels”.
It can be so overwhelming, for anyone, but particularly young women, growing up in the age of Ozempic and TikTok. But there is so much more to life than what you weigh.
“The number on the scale is not going to change how you feel on the inside,” Meranda said as we wrapped up our chat.
Dr Price echoed her view and added that, if abused, weight-loss drugs can create more problems than they solve.
“There is a lot of social pressure to look a certain way but your health is worth so much more,” she said.
If you’re struggling, someone you love is struggling or just needs some support, the NHS recommends Beat, a charity focused on eating disorders. which has many resources that can help.
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