One of the UK's top scientists has warned that the UK needs to prepare for a pandemic far deadlier than Covid.
Professor Mark Woolhouse, who was a member of the Scientific Pandemic Infections group on Modelling (SPI-M) which advised the Government during the pandemic, issued the grim alert on Wednesday as the Covid inquiry in London entered its fourth week.
A total of 227,000 people died from Covid in the UK during the pandemic - but the expert in infectious disease epidemiology believes it is likely we will have to face up to a virus in the future which could potentially claim even more lives.
He told the panel: "I hope this doesn't sound too shocking, but on the scale of potential pandemics, Covid was not at the top and it was possibly quite far from the top.
"It may be that next time — and there will be a next time, I don't know when, it may be quite some time in the future — we will be dealing with a virus that is much more deadly, and is also much more transmissible, in which case actually the things we did to control Covid wouldn't work anyway"
He claim that he was not being a "doom-monger" but that he was "confident enough to tell government that this is something you should be concerned about".
"The next pandemic could be far more difficult to handle than Covid-19 was, and we all saw the damage that that pandemic caused us", he said.
Professor Woolhouse also offered his views on the UK's preparedness for the last pandemic, and likened the country's decision to plan primarily for an influenza-type virus above all other pandemic threats to betting on "only one horse at the Grand National."
He expanded on this analogy by saying that while a meeting with top horse racing experts ahead of the race would likely produce a single 'favourite', you would be likely to lose all of your money if you backed only this horse - a situation he said closely resembled existing pandemic policy before Covid struck.
He said: "The problem with that, it sounds a very rational strategy, but the problem is there's an awful lot of horses in the Grand National, and the chance of the favourite winning is actually quite small. 4 to 1 would be very, very short odds for the favourite for a Grand National.
"But the chance of the horse winning with the 4 to 1 odds is only 20%. If you bet on the favourite, you are very likely to lose your money."
The professor admitted that he would have also have predicted an influenza pandemic as the most likely before Covid-19 emerged, adding that interest within the wider scientific community had been heavily influenced by the swine flu pandemic of 2009/2010.
