The Prince of Wales, 71, has opened up about his brush with COVID19 in a new interview with Sky News for their series After The Pandemic: Our New World, which will air tomorrow night.
Speaking from his Aberdeenshire home of Birkhall, he told royal correspondent Rhiannon Mills: '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.'
Prince Charles added: '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.'
'I know that so many people have had the agony of losing their loved ones and the bewilderment and anxiety that surrounds everything.
'It is the most awful aspect of a pandemic like this, and yet we've seen at the same time people being quite remarkable and wonderful people in the national health service and all the other key workers who kept everything going.'
Prince Charles went on to explain that the crisis could offer a moment of opportunity for the environment.
He explained: '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.
'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.'
The Prince of Wales went on to say that without learning from this pandemic, there may be more to come from in the future, commenting: '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.
'We should have been treating the planet as if it was a patient long ago. No self-respecting doctor would ever have let the situation, if the planet is a patient, reach this stage before making an intervention.
'It's only catastrophes which concentrate the mind, which means, that for once, there might be some real impetus to tackle all these things that have been pushed to one side because everyone said, 'oh it's irrelevant'. But these are crucial things.'
