By the time Boris Johnson was stepping back into Number 10 Downing Street on December 13 2019 as a newly-elected Prime Minister, Covid - a disease that would nearly claim his life and define his premiership - had already begun spreading in China. Although the first cluster of mysterious pneumonia cases was not officially identified by the health authorities in Wuhan until December 31, scientists have since estimated that the earliest infections probably date back to October or November 2019. At the time, Britain was in the grip of an election campaign that was all about "getting Brexit done"; no one could have envisioned the catastrophe to come.
Four and a half years on, as we find ourselves thrust once again into a snap general election , another quietly troubling virus story was unfolding thousands of miles away - this time in the United States. MORE ANALYSIS: Miami murders, Black Lives Matter, Sheku Bayoh: Why 'excited delirium' links them all AstraZeneca vaccine changed the course of Covid - but question marks remain Was lockdown avoidable? Yes - if we had 'followed the science' On Wednesday, the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed that a second human case of the "highly pathogenic" avian influenza, H5N1, had been detected in a farm worker in Michigan. The infection is associated with an ongoing, multi-state outbreak of the virus among dairy cows which was first detected in March, having previously wiped out thousands of seabirds before spreading into mammals.
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