Devi Sridhar: Coronavirus pandemic showed that Scotland is an unhealthy nation

The coronavirus pandemic revealed that Scotland is an unhealthy nation and more needs to be done to improve the public’s overall wellbeing.

That is the view of Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, who says other countries manage to have healthier populations and fared better during the pandemic.

Speaking to STV News, she said: “It has less to do with individuals and more to do with the country you live in – the politics, the economics and the society.

“I think (it’s about) moving away from this idea of individual wellness, your own fitness, to ‘how do we work together, how do we value health as a society?’

“How do we get politicians to value our health – whether it’s access to health care, or whether it’s what we eat, or whether it’s the air we breathe?

“Because that was where you were at going into the pandemic. And actually that would help make you resilient going into another one rather than just working on vaccines, which are important.

“We need those scientific medical breakthroughs, but more importantly, we need overall improvements in health, which we know what makes people ill.

“We just have to have that leadership and that, you know, investment to make it better.”

Professor Sridhar, who was a prominent commentator during the pandemic, believes Scotland had quite a fragile population when Covid struck in 2020.

“(There is) collective amnesia. We want to forget because it was such a traumatic couple of years. But we also need to recognise that the pandemic revealed how unhealthy Scotland is.

“Coming out of it, how do we think of pandemic response, or even outbreak response, in terms of public health more broadly?

“How do we all become healthier? Because countries that did have healthier populations did better throughout the pandemic.

“What you did see is inequality increased, including health inequalities. The fit became fitter and those who were struggling maybe struggled more with their health.

“It becomes: ‘How do you actually reduce those two ends and bring them closer together?’

“How do we actually make sure that we have enough appointments in the NHS? So I think it’s getting back to the premise of what makes a population healthy.

“What are those building blocks and how do you make improvements in each of those? There are things you can do but it requires a real commitment to improving people’s health, and doing that as a collective enterprise rather than saying to people it’s your responsibility alone.

“This is the wider public health approach, which is generally why did we emerge so badly from the pandemic and what can we learn from it?

“There’s two aspects to that. It’s the underlying health status. How do you improve public health as a whole? There’s also the response and all that – to give hope and optimism to people.”

In terms of the response, it was five years ago on Sunday that then UK prime minister Boris Johnson delivered a televised address urging people to ‘stay at home’.

The lockdowns that followed disrupted all our lives for years – is it possible that another pandemic could lead to such a scenario again in our lifetime?

Sridhar is not so sure.

She said: “I think it’d be very difficult for governments to impose something top down.

“I think what you probably would likely see is when people saw their friends getting ill, their family members heard what was happening in hospitals, they might change their own behaviour in a way that protects themselves.

“You know, that human desire to live longer and actually not get ill.

“So I think could we have another government come in and say, actually, we want you to stay at home?

“(That is) very difficult to implement, but actually people might themselves change their behaviour, which is what we saw in a lot of contexts and countries.

“People have information, they can see what’s happening, but hopefully this is a hypothetical and doesn’t happen within our lifetimes.”