A health expert has said the world pre-2020 "no longer exists" and there is no going "back" to normal.
Prof. Christina Pagel, director of the Clinical Operational Research Unit at University College London, took to Twitter to share her personal views on where we go from here as restrictions ease further in Wales and across the UK. She said: "I keep being asked when we can go 'back to normal' or 'like it was before'. We've added a new disease to our population, more infectious and more severe than flu. The world pre 2020 no longer exists - we may want it to, but it just doesn't."
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The professor, who is a member of Independent Sage, an "independent group of scientists providing transparent advice during the Covid crisis", said that while vaccines are "amazing" they aloo wane, as does immunity. She wrote: "We *could* act as we used to [and] accept millions of people getting sick once or twice a year. Yearly education, business disruption. And gradually, a slightly sicker [population]. That seems to be the current plan in UK and e.g. US. But that's NOT the 'old normal' - it's worse."
Instead, she suggested the world can only move forward and "accept we need some adaptations - driven by what we have learned". She said: "I prefer for us to build a new normal that's better than frequent sickness [and] disruption."
And she suggested ways in which we could adapt our lives to minimise disruption from any future Covid waves.
Outdoors air: The professor stated that outdoors is "pretty safe", so we should be investing in research to make indoor air as much like the air outdoors as possible. The best thing about cleaner indoor air is it works against any airborne disease."
Vaccinations: To vaccinate the world as soon as possible, and continue working on vaccines that last longer and are "more variant proof."
Surveillance: To invest in a global infrastructure to support surveillance of new Covid variants as well as other infectious diseases. "There will be more," she writes. She added that we should add permanent Covid infection surveillance into existing programmes for flu, measles etc in public health.
Long covid: We need to invest in the understanding and treatment of long term impacts of Covid, such as organ damage, Long Covid, and treatments for the acute phase.
NHS funding: The expert wrote: "We need to urgently increase funding and staffing for NHS if it is expected to cope with regular Covid surges and existing backlogs and years of understaffing and not enough money. This includes supporting existing staff to stay."
Planning: Future surges are inevitable and we need to plan for these as we do for other diseases, she said. The plan needs support from rapid outbreak identification, and rapid understanding of virulence and transmission, which we have already been doing well. She listed that this plan could include large-scale testing and high quality masks indoors (only if there is a serious threat), however she stated this should not mean "long national lockdowns".
Tackle inequalities: Inequalities in health, housing, workplaces, sick pay, and education need to be tackled in order to make us more resiliant to future outbreaks, both nationally and globally.
She signed off the tread stating that our world is different now: "Acting as if it isn't, which UK seems determined to do, may feel good in short term but will result in a new normal worse than the old one."
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