Pandemic Preparedness Quiz

Pandemic Preparedness Quiz

HPA Induction, 2025

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There are 5 main routes of transmission for disease-causing pathogens

Outbreaks of a disease can sometimes lead to an epidemic or a pandemic

There have been 6 pandemics in the century leading up to COVID-19

The National Risk Register is the government's assessement of the most serious acute risks in the UK

It only includes risks that would have a substantial impact on the UK’s safety, security and/or critical systems

• Can be malicious or non-malicious
• Malicious risks are from someone who intends to do us harm
• Non-malicious risks are unintentional events

The NRR includes information about 89 risks, including:

• Cyber attacks
• Civil nuclear accident
• Failure of electricity network
• Storms
• Pandemic
• Outbreak of an emerging infectious disease

Emergency Planning in the NRR is based on a series of reasonable worst-case scenarios (RWCS)

• Pandemic reasonable worst-case scenario
• 50% of the population are infected and symptomatic (~33.8m)
• 4% of cases (symptomatic infections) require hospital care (~1.4m)
• A case fatality ratio of 2.5% (~840,000)

Historically, government planning focused on pandemic influenza, whereas now, preparedness has become pathogen-agnostic

• Pre-COVID-19, the UK followed the 2011 Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy,
• which followed a 'defence in depth' approach, consisting of layers of interventions that could be used to minimise spread and treat individual cases.

• Current pandemic preparedness focuses on developing a system that is not based on specific plans, but rather core capabilities and resilience.

• This is done by considering the main routes of transmission in addition to specific pathogens (e.g. seasonal flu; COVID-19)

In particular for HPA work, the Review of Emergency Preparedness Countermeasures included recommendations on updated planning scenarios

as well as a number of recommendations on stockpiling clinical countermeasures