Five years on, have we learned the lessons of covid-19?

Not touching your face. Panic-buying toilet roll. Disinfecting groceries. Some of the advice and behaviour of the early days of the covid-19 pandemic can, in retrospect, seem utterly bizarre. But when an unknown virus swept rapidly around the world, we were engulfed by questions – how does it spread, who is most at risk, how can I avoid catching it and just how bad is this going to get – that the instruments of medical science couldn’t immediately answer.

“None of us could comprehend the scale and broad societal impact of this, the speed at which it developed,” says …