Former BBC correspondent and Things Unseen presenter Mike Wooldridge has reported first hand on many of the world’s worst disasters of the last few decades: the famine in Ethiopia, the earthquake in Haiti and the AIDS epidemic in Uganda. So what can we learn from how people handled these disasters, which affected some of the most vulnerable groups on earth?

In this short reflection, Mike draws his own lessons for the coronavirus pandemic. Placing our common humanity – known in Africa as Ubuntu – at the centre of our response, he says, will be of key importance.