The Prince of Wales has spoken of his recovery from coronavirus, saying he “can understand what other people have gone through” while admitting he “got away with it quite likely”.
Prince Charles, 71, experienced only mild symptoms after he contracted Covid-19 in March, he then recuperated while in self-isolation at his Scottish home of Birkhall.
Speaking to Sky News in an interview broadcast on Thursday, he paid tribute to key and health workers, and expressed sympathy with those who had lost family or friends.
Asked about his own virus experience, he said: “It makes me even more determined to push and shout and prod.
“I was lucky in my case and got away with it quite lightly. But I’ve had it, and I can so understand what other people have gone through.
“I feel particularly for those who have lost their loved ones and have been unable to be with them at the time. That, to me, is the most ghastly thing.
“But in order to prevent this happening to so many more people, I’m so determined to find a way out of this.”
He told Sky News royal correspondent Rhiannon Mills: “I can’t tell you how much I sympathise with the way that everyone has had to endure with this unbelievably testing and challenging time.”
The heir to the throne then told the broadcaster that the world could see further pandemics if humans don’t put our relationship with the planet at the centre of the post-Covid recovery.
“People have begun to realise that we have to put nature back at the centre of everything we do and put it at the centre of our economy, “ he said.
“Before this nature has just been pushed to the peripheries, we’ve exploited and dug up and cut down everything as if there was no tomorrow, as if it doesn’t matter.”
He stressed that without learning from the pandemic we may face a similar threat in the future: “The more we erode the natural world, the more we destroy biodiversity, the more we expose ourselves to this kind of danger.
“We’ve had these other disasters with Sars and Ebola and goodness knows what else, all of these things are related to the loss of biodiversity. So we have to find a way this time to put nature back at the centre.”