What Britain has to offer to the world was never clearer than in the leading role we took in the Covid crisis – and all because of a chance meeting on a number 18 bus from Marylebone to Euston in London.
Martin Landray found himself next to another epidemiologist Sir Jeremy Farrar and they began to talk about a new respiratory disease, SARS-CoV-2, which had originated in China and now reached the UK.
At that stage life was still normal, as demonstrated by the packed bus they were on. But the new coronavirus was crippling the health system in the north of Italy.
The two scientists agreed it would spread through the UK in a fortnight and they had to start searching for treatments – fast.
Clinical trials were necessary. Ordinarily, such trials would take around a year to get off the ground. But the two medics knew that in a global emergency things had to be different.
