Public health is about trust – something Cummings has wilfully ignored | Richard Coker

If the public is no longer reassured by the government's social distancing measures, I fear a second wave of coronavirus

• Richard Coker is emeritus professor of public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
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Thirty-five years ago, when I was working as a newly qualified doctor, I extracted a sausage from a woman's windpipe. She was, in the eyes of the ambulance crew who brought her in, probably beyond saving, possibly already dead. The woman had inhaled the sausage while laughing at a joke she'd been telling her family. I leant over her, used a laryngoscope to peer into her larynx, saw the sausage and extracted it. She took a big gasp, looked around in surprise, and after a short recovery, walked out of A&E. I felt a surge of pride. I was a proper doctor. I'd saved someone's life. My mum understood what I did for a living.

After working as a clinician for many years, I became a public health researcher and worked on tuberculosis and emerging infectious diseases for about 25 years. I never got, with the same immediacy, the sense one gets from saving a life. But I suspect that through my research I've touched far more lives than I could ever have hoped to in clinical medicine - even if those lives remain anonymous, distant, opaque. In public health, the stakes of life and death are more distant - but no less impactful.