The 63-year-old, from Golders Green in north London, has been a leading voice throughout Covid-19, but is not sure that we are any better prepared for another pandemic.

“I don’t feel enormously confident that we have learned the lesson sufficiently to be that much better at dealing with the next pandemic,” Prof Altmann told me.

“There will be other scary viruses and I don’t feel like we’re in a fundamentally better position than we were.

“And if you asked me how another one might play out, I think that there are governments at different stages around the world, playing a kind of wishful thinking.

“They say things like ‘we did terribly well and were one of the first to come out of it’, but truthfully, if you look at what has been happening recently, in Hong Kong, Denmark, or even Scotland, nobody has come out of it.

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