As Covid spread across the globe in the early months of 2020, nations went into lockdown, millions died, and hundreds of millions were infected; people everywhere were made to confront a new way of life. We all grew used to changes in our routines, from wearing facemasks and keeping two metres apart on the rare occasions we were able to leave our home, to sticking medical swabs up our nose and in the back of our throat to see if a cough or a loss of smell was a symptom of Covid-19. The change in routine applied at work as much as in our homes and personal lives. Those who could, shifted from working in offices to bedrooms, kitchens, and garden sheds; others were put on furlough or lost their jobs completely as businesses cut costs or closed. The short-term economic effects were immediate and obvious. In life, there is a tendency to focus on the here and now, on events happening right in front of us. But when it comes to the effects of a pandemic, we cannot look only at the short-term, we must consider the potential impacts in years and decades to come. What might happen a decade down the line from Covid’s emergence? What impacts might there still be on our health? After all, viral descendants of the 1918-19 global flu pandemic were still circulating a century later. Then there are the socioeconomic effects – sickness and an inability to work implies a loss of income and wealth. What might these effects look like two decades later? How will workers at both ends of the economic scale be affected? We have been studying the potential impacts of Covid-19 in the future years, learning from past influenza pandemics how persistent mortality and recurrent outbreak effects can be. PATTERNS FROM HISTORY Historically, the health and socioeconomic effects of pandemics have been shown to act unequally across the population, leading to concerns that the effects of Covid will be worse for the most vulnerable groups in society. Since 2020, I have worked alongside colleagues from the University of Glasgow on a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of UK Research and Innovations rapid response to Covid-19. We have been looking at the health and wealth inequality implications of Covid in the short- and medium-term. To analyse what might happen in the future, we first need to understand how likely it is for recurrent outbreaks to persist and continue to impact mortality. That is, we must understand whether the direct health implications of the pandemic are only a one-off, or whether they may reappear in the decades that follow. To do this, we looked back at the period following previous influenza pandemics in the UK between 1838 and 2000 – and primarily the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. In studying UK cities, and patterns in the US, we found that the initial waves of influenza pandemics are followed by two decades of high risk of recurrent outbreaks, making the overall impact even greater. 40 |
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