The past week has seen the most significant transformation of peoples lives across the whole of the UK in living memory. The vast majority of the population has been confined to their homes and the economy has effectively closed.

These dramatic measures have been taken by the government in order to combat the spread and death toll of Covid-19. Most would agree that the virus has had enormous consequences for the country. It could however have been a lot worse.

On 19 March 2020 Covid-19 was reappraised by the public health bodies in the UK and The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens, their collective opinion was that, “Covid-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.” That is, a High Consequence Infectious Disease. This a a technical assessment based on growing confidence in the mortality rate, the availability of laboratory tests for the virus, and no doubt much more. As awful as this virus is and as badly prepared as we seem to be  it, it could have been a lot worse.

I do not know what a HCID looks like but presume it has a higher infection rate and a higher mortality rate. On line there are various epidemiological models which you can use to manipulate a range of variables which determine the outcome of the virus. Whilst some are not very sensitive, ie. you can move them quite a distance and they do not significantly change the overall out come. That is not true of the infection rate and the mortality rate.

Covid-19 is set to kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. From a standing start, in the space of three months it has circulated to over 150 countries and resulted in around 800k deaths. The response to the virus has, in some cases been slow. What is clear is that days matter and decisive action is needed early. If we ever get a HCID our response has to be quicker and even more decisive. Hours will matter. We should not assume we have a century to prepare for the next one.