PROFESSOR Linda Bauld has been one of the most instantly recognisable faces of the year of Covid.

As a go-to expert in her role as the Bruce and John Usher Chair of Public Health in the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh, she has never been more in demand.

She said: “It’s been off the scale. I’ve had six days off since February 2020 and that includes Christmas.

“I feel very committed to public health, so I just made the decision last March that I would do everything I could and the media work has been part of that, so it’s been pretty relentless.

“But also the Covid studies I’ve been involved in and setting up asymptomatic testing for the university and sitting on funding panels for rapid Covid studies, means it’s not all been media.

“The impact of the media work is a lot of early morning breakfast interviews and then also just the pressure to be constantly up to date, so I’m reading stuff all the time. I’ve really had to branch out a lot.

“I feel more comfortable about it now. It’s a bit like in my previous areas of work I did a lot of work on alcohol, diet, and when you enter a new area like for example, e-cigarettes, you have to get up to speed on it, and that’s the same now.

“And I’m much clearer too now that if we get into a Covid topic that is too clinical I just say, ‘I’m not a clinician’.

“So in the earlier days I felt a much higher level of personal anxiety, but now I think a year on I keep getting asked similar questions so I feel more confident. I think, too, that it’s really important for academics not to overstep.”

It’s not just interviewers who have been firing questions at Professor Bauld though.

She said: “When I’m in the supermarket and wearing a face covering not so much, but when I’m out on the street I get people stop me and talk to me.

“And then you’ll also get people who will smile at me and wave at me and I think they think that they know me but they don’t know me. It’s a general recognition.

“It’s normally older people who will stop me, and they’ll ask me how I think things are going, what I think the direction of travel is, what’s happening next.

“I also get dozens of emails every day and particularly at the weekend because my email is on the university website. They ask me about vaccines or restrictions and I just can’t answer them all.

Being an expert in her field, Bauld has a better understanding than most of Covid, which can be challenging.

She said: “I get upset about some of this, the same way the general population do. I get worried but I guess my distress is more for the country, for people, than personally. But then having more knowledge can be useful sometimes, too.’’

Such a heavy workload has proved challenging for the 50-year-old academic as she has also had to juggle family life, too.

Like us all, Bauld has seen her life turned upside down and is looking forward to it returning to normal.

She added: “The first thing would be that I’ve been diverted from my other work and that’s caused some challenges for colleagues in those projects.

“And the other thing is I’m exercising less than I used to. In the first lockdown when it was good weather I was running most days and I really need to get back into that because I think that has really kept me going.

“My family, my two teenage children, Cameron and Ailsa, have been brilliant, very resilient with the big disruption in their lives, and I’m very grateful to them.

“We’ve had lots of arguments about home schooling. And in the first wave they became nocturnal – they would be wandering around the house at night. So we’ve had lots of challenges in our house and my husband, too, has been very good.

“And then my parents are in the west coast of Canada. I haven’t seen them in about 18 months.

“I do miss not being able to travel. I used to travel a lot, probably far too much, and it’s been a strange experience not going anywhere, just like the rest of the country.

“Top of the list for me when I can is to get out and see Mum and Dad.’’