Stark Sheffield covid warning – there will be more pandemics and we need to be better prepared
Sheffield public health officials have issued a stark warning following the covid-19 pandemic – there will be more and it is vital to learn the lessons to be better prepared next time.
The warning was made at a meeting of Sheffield health and wellbeing board (September 26). This brings together Sheffield City Council, NHS leaders and other city organisations to scrutinise health services.
The meeting considered a report on Sheffield’s response to the pandemic by director of public health Greg Fell.
Mr Fell said: “Bad news, there’s going to be another pandemic – I’m sorry, I’ve lived through three in my professional career. This was a big one – I hope it was the big one.
“It’s critically important to document the learning from that in the city, hence the focus of the report.”
His colleague Dr Chris Gibbons said: “Many people lost their lives during the pandemic and many more felt the impact of illness, bereavement and financial precarity.”
Overcrowded
He said the team analysing the data were always aware that it represented people and communities.
The report stressed that the poor health of citizens had a bearing on the outcomes.
It acknowledged that issues such as poor, overcrowded housing, jobs where it was impossible to work from home or take sick time off and low pay, plus lower vaccine take-up, meant that the pandemic had a worse effect on people living in deprived areas. This included people from black and ethnic minority groups, as well as vulnerable people in care homes.
Dr Gibbons said that immediate access to personal-level data will be vital in the next pandemic to be able to accurately assess the picture and plan the response. The report said that this took four months.
Sheffield was at the leading edge of this work, said Dr Gibbons.
He said every sector in the city must have a role in planning and response, not just health services.
Resilience
“Future pandemic planning must include communications infrastructure, maintaining education systems, job retention, economic resilience, community engagement, robust sick pay policies, systems for distribution of food and medicines.
“These activities are as important as epidemiological modelling, stockpiling of PPE, ventilators, NHS capacity and resilience. We currently do not have an easy mechanism for ensuring this happens, however.”
Dr Gibbons said: “I have heard it said in some places that people have no ‘bandwidth’ left for covid-19 – people want to move on with their lives and put those difficult years behind us.
“I can understand that perspective. What that means in practice, though, is that it’s incumbent on all of us to read this report, act on the recommendations therein to the fullest of our abilities and commit the lessons learned to memory.
Uncertainty
“This is critical because, although there is uncertainty about when, there is no uncertainty about if.
"There will be another pandemic in the future and we must go into that one armed with the lessons of the recent past.”
A series of leaflets giving advice to help people cope with long covid have been produced by Healthwatch Sheffield after people said it was not easily available.
Long covid affects people who continue to have symptoms of covid-19 for more than 12 weeks and often far longer.
The most common symptoms are listed in the advice as extreme tiredness, shortness of breath, loss of smell and muscle aches, but there are many more.