Tracking Emerging Public Health Challenges – March 22, 2026 – COVID
“People around the country were first urged to stay at home in March 2020 to contain the oncoming pandemic
The long-awaited report into the impact the Covid pandemic had on the NHS has been published.
It has found that the NHS in England came close to collapse during the height of the pandemic, only narrowly avoiding it due to the efforts of healthcare staff.
Among the 400 pages of text, the inquiry questions the government’s “stay at home” messaging, highlights how patients were failed and finds that hospital visiting rules were too tough.
Austerity left NHS in ‘precarious position’
In the decade leading up to the pandemic, the NHS had seen its budget squeezed on a historic level.
The inquiry’s report says this meant the NHS entered the pandemic with not enough beds or staff – a “precarious position” to be in.
The situation meant that the NHS struggled to cope with the surge in Covid patients, particularly in the first wave, with supplies of oxygen almost running out in places.
As the pandemic progressed, the NHS reached a state of overwhelm and patients did not get the level of care they needed. The pressure was, at times, intolerable and this continued through wave after wave of Covid.
Waiting times for ambulances, even the most life-threatening calls, grew with some services turning to the military to help.
Intensive care staffing ratios were diluted, going from one nurse to one patient to one to four at times.
A collapse of the NHS was only narrowly avoided, the report says, because of the extraordinary efforts of its staff.” (1)
“COVID may have killed significantly more people in the U.S. in the first two years of the pandemic than official records indicate, with as many as one overlooked death for every five recorded ones. That brings the total to nearly one million deaths just in 2020 and 2021.
That calculation comes from research published today in Science Advances that seeks to understand how many COVID deaths fell through the cracks of official reporting systems. The untallied cases show the burden of the pandemic in the U.S. fell most heavily on marginalized people.
“These vulnerable groups are just taking a higher risk at every step, and the accumulation of all of that is this disparity in COVID mortality at the end,” says Mathew Kiang, an epidemiologist at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.
In the new research, Kiang and his colleagues analyzed official records published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for deaths occurring from March 2020 through December 2021 for adults aged 25 and older—some 5.7 million records in all. First, they fed a machine-learning algorithm the records of deaths in hospitals, which at the time were testing most patients for COVID. They trained the algorithm to recognize hospital deaths in which COVID was formally identified as an underlying cause. Then they used the algorithm to flag potential unrecognized COVID deaths by identifying records that looked like hospitalized COVID deaths but occurred in other settings where testing was less likely.” (2)
“Modelling shows that more than eight million people who died during the COVID-19 pandemic might be alive today if the international community had achieved CEPI’s 100 Days Mission to develop safe and effective vaccines within three months.
It also found that a successful 100 Days Mission could have: Prevented 800 million infections; Averted 15.7 million hospitalisations ; saved 4.8 million lives in lower middle-income countries; Delivered economic benefits valued at up to US$14.3 trillion” (3)
“An expert in warning research says the world is already forgetting key lessons from COVID-19, as urgency fades and risks become ‘normalised’.
Early alerts about threats such as bird flu can be diluted by bureaucracy, political pressure and fragmented data systems before action is taken.
Strong surveillance, clear communication and public trust are essential to ensure warnings translate into timely response.
The next pandemic is not a matter of if, but when. But have we learned the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure early warnings of the next health crisis are heeded?
We spoke to Dr Nikki Ikani, Assistant Professor of Intelligence & Security at Leiden University and King’s College London, to find out how insights from warning research could help us better prepare for potential epidemics and pandemics.
Q. You’ve said the world is forgetting the lessons from COVID-19. What do you think explains the collective amnesia in terms of how we approach future threats?
I’ve spent a long time studying disasters from pandemics to intelligence failures, industrial catastrophes and geopolitical crises. And one stubborn pattern keeps resurfacing: institutions are good at cataloguing calamities but terrible at heeding the warnings that precede them.
As soon as the crisis passes, the sense of urgency disappears and safety rules relax. What once demanded urgent correction begins to feel less pressing. This a process we call ‘normalisation of risk’. Close calls become routine, and people stop remembering how risky things really are.
On top of that, we rarely learn the right lesson. Sometimes we forget to learn at all, and other times we draw the wrong conclusions.
Early warnings are often real and accurate. But once they enter the bureaucratic chain, they get filtered, softened and bundled with other data.” (4)
“Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) was associated with 190,000 to 350,000 hospitalizations from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025, as well as 10,000 to 23,000 deaths, according to data published last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
During the same time, COVID-19 was associated with an estimated 290,000 to 450,000 hospitalizations and 34,000 to 53,000 deaths.” (5)
Have We Already Forgotten The Lessons of Covid-19?
COVID 5 years later: Learning from a pandemic many are forgetting
https://www.science.org/content/article/covid-5-years-later-learning-pandemic-many-are-forgetting
Five Years After Covid-19: What Have We Learned (and Forgotten)?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rhc3.70011?msockid=1aa9eeb3336365ee130ff9a2329364f8
5 Years Later: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic
Five years after Covid‐19: What have we learned (and forgotten)?
4 years after the pandemic struck: lessons learned and opportunities missed
Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic
Have we already forgotten the lessons of COVID-19? We asked an expert in anticipating crises
Have we learned the lessons of covid-19?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0262407925000041
VOICES: We’ve already forgotten the lessons learned from the pandemic
1.Stay at home advice questioned and rules too tough – key findings from Covid report, by Nick Triggle, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87wg0lvnxjo
2.COVID probably killed 150,000 more people in its first two years than official U.S. tolls show, By Meghan Bartels edited by Tanya Lewis, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-killed-150-000-more-people-in-its-first-two-years-than-official-toll/
3.What if the world had delivered COVID-19 vaccines in 100 days?, https://www.facebook.com/GAVI/posts/what-if-the-world-had-delivered-covid-19-vaccines-in-100-days-modelling-shows-th/1365951022227905/
4.Have we already forgotten the lessons of COVID-19? We asked an expert in anticipating crises, Priya Joi, https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/have-we-already-forgotten-lessons-covid-19-we-asked-expert-anticipating-crises
5.Up to 56,000 people died from COVID-19 or RSV last year, by Liz Szabo, MA, https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/56000-people-died-covid-19-or-rsv-last-year
curated by Jonathan M. Metsch, Dr.P.H.
Clinical Professor of Environmental Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai