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On 12th October 2008 I attended a conference at which an epidemiologist stood up and said "My job is to tell you something you don't want to know, and ask you to spend money you haven't got on something you don't think is going to happen." I taught pandemic preparedness on the basis of his example for the next 12 years.
But in 2008 floods stretched from Alnwick in Northumberland to Tewksbury in Somerset, nearly 500 km away. Oddly, it was sidelined during the pandemic as the Cabinet Office Minister, Michael Gove, judged it to be 'too extreme'. It lacks a national emergency operations centre. Emergencyplanning is a vital occupation.
It is now more than ten years since there was a general push to induce countries to plan for pandemics (WHO 2005). US Homeland Security Council 2005, UK Government 2008), while in others it did not. That was at a time when an influenza pandemic with devastating consequences was greatly feared.
Since the start of the crisis, I have constantly affirmed that the key to understanding the effects of this pandemic is the UK Government's failure to give adequate weight to emergencyplanning and management (Alexander 2020a, 2020b). There were major exercises on pandemics in 2005, 2007 and 2016. Exercise Cygnus Report.
The lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic, alas largely negative, show that a good civilian system designed to protect the public against major hazards and threats can save thousands of lives and billions in losses and wasted expenditure. Non-seasonal influenza retains the potential to cause a pandemic on the level of that of 1918-1920.
Tierney (2008) provided a functional semantic classification of the size of extreme events (revised by Alexander 2016, p. ) Pandemics are included because many of the effects of a pandemic are likely to be socio-economic in nature. and this might give us some basis for distinguishing phenomena by the magnitude of their impacts.
Image: US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases In terms of its scope, Covid-19 is like no other disaster that has occurred in the last 100 years, since, in fact, the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed more people than both world wars combined, and contributed to the end of the First World War.
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