With coronavirus we don’t have that weaponry. Another concern is that H1N1 started in April at the end of the influenza season which really helped the response. It is not yet proven whether warmer temperatures will affect the spread of coronavirus – there is a lot we still don’t know.

Ultimately H1N1 led to nearly 460 deaths in Britain but seemed to particularly affect children and pregnant women. The number of people hospitalised was actually very small but even then it put hospitals under pressure. At one point every paediatric critical care bed was in use.

With coronavirus, the affected population is different with a very high fatality rate among over 80s and a need for intensive care spaces.

There is a risk of the virus being spread around hospitals and care homes are another worry. The H1N1 outbreak emphasised to us the need to be flexible in our response – and certainly coronavirus will test that once more.

Ebola: Dr Oliver Johnson, King’s College London

In 2014, I was working in the main teaching hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, leading a small team from King’s College London working to strengthen the health system. Ebola had started over the border in Guinea and my first memories are knowing the outbreak was heading towards us and thinking how are we going to get prepared?

In the early months of the outbreak, almost all of the staff who were infected with Ebola at our hospital died. One face that stays in my mind was an amazing young nurse called Hajara Serry, who we were supporting to improve emergency care. One day I saw her slumped in her chair with a yellow glaze to her eyes that we had come to recognise as ‘Ebola eyes’.

I remember putting her in the ambulance late on Saturday. We both knew she was almost certainly going to die, and that my farewell would probably be the last words she would ever hear – she didn’t survive the journey. I’m still haunted by the knowledge that we had failed to protect her.