Why Britain simply cannot afford to be complacent when it comes to hantavirus - Ismail Mulla

Last week, as I watched the World Health Organisation (WHO) hold a press conference in Geneva, there was a dreaded sense of deja vu in the pit of my stomach.

Something called hantavirus was here and it could prove potentially deadly for the world’s population. The authorities were clearly taking it seriously. And in my naivety I thought surely they will do all they can to contain it. There’s no evidence to the contrary yet.

But then my mind flashed back to those rain-sodden days of late 2019, when something called the Coronavirus was starting to make a ripple on the news agenda. Back then I also thought that the authorities would have a handle on it.

Stories of the first cases of those who had contracted Covid being isolated and monitored reassured me that the issue would be dealt with in an orderly manner and we would by and large not be affected by it.

How wrong I was. How wrong we all were. The Covid crisis turned out to be a generational event. The horror of people clinging on for dear life on ventilators in hospitals. Loved ones dying on their own. Ordinary people being asked to put themselves in harm’s way and do extraordinary things. We characterised them as superheroes to make ourselves feel better about putting them at risk.

Political ineptitude didn’t douse flames but poured petrol on it. We swung from herd immunity to stay indoors and save the community. Sending people back into care homes from hospitals without testing them, therefore seeding this deadly virus into spaces that should have kept elderly and vulnerable people safe.

Politicians vacillated between ‘saving the NHS’ and ‘saving Pret’. By all accounts the government of the day looked exactly how it would if you put a college debating society in charge of looking at the country.

There is no use raking over old coals. The country needs to face the future. But in order to face that future lessons of the past need to be learned.

However, Britain finds itself in a dangerous position. There was never any closure with the Covid pandemic. As a colleague of mine pointed to me a while back, we never had an end date to the crisis. No real national acknowledgement of those that lost their lives or those left bereaved. It was almost as if collectively we decided to hide away this dark chapter of recent history.

By doing so, we are more liable to forget lessons that the Covid pandemic should have taught us. That starts with rejecting complacency. ‘An outbreak can’t happen here, surely’ needs to be replaced with ‘what are we going to do to mitigate the spread of another virus?’

I have already seen a small smattering of people masking up. The majority of us are not at that stage yet but if hantavirus starts spreading, then it will have to be done.

This is not about living in fear but rather confronting reality. And those that need to meet this reality head-on are our lawmakers. Baroness Hallett and the Covid Inquiry is forensically going through the events of the previous pandemic. Rightly, the inquiry has been taking its time and the final reports will not be published until next year.

All the reports that have been published should be seized upon by the Government to start formulating policies and a clear roadmap to ensuring that the country’s population is protected from hantavirus or indeed any other contagious disease.

The fear is that the general public will reject any attempts to mitigate the spread of a future outbreak, having been left jaded by the Covid crisis and the response to it. But that would not excuse negligence on the part of decision makers.

On the same day as my trip to Manchester Airport a chartered flight transported passengers, evacuated from a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak, from the Canary Islands to the airport in the evening.

Twenty British passengers, who were tested for hantavirus before getting on the flight, were taken to isolate at the UK’s initial Covid quarantine site at Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral, Merseyside.

A sobering reminder that another outbreak is only a few steps away and that we simply cannot be complacent. That should be the first lesson that is taken away and applied from the Covid pandemic.