The cost of pessimistic individualism was measured in tens of thousands of lives
Great calamities often provoke reflections about the human condition. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 led people to reconsider their relationship with God, and compelled Voltaire to viciously lampoon Leibniz’s notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The 1918-19 influenza pandemic forced people to rethink how they relate to the natural world, inspiring a new style of architecture, a new appreciation of the outdoors, and a range of back-to-nature movements. And Covid … ?
Well, judging by the coverage of the inquiry so far, the big issues seem to be how government figures used WhatsApp and who uttered which obscenity about whom. But despite this masterclass in trivialisation, Covid did have something profound to teach us about the relationship of individuals to society. For nearly two centuries, since the spectacular growth of cities sparked by the advent of industrialisation, western social thought has been obsessed with how to maintain control.Once people were concentrated together and physically separated from their erstwhile masters, would they still respect the old hierarchies? Or would they join together to dismantle them?
This was reflected in a profound fear of the masses, particularly of crowds. The social elites lived in perpetual fear of the howling mobs. The outcome was a pervasive pessimism about the popular psyche and an entrenched anti-collectivism. This still dominates my discipline, psychology. It is reflected in the notion that human reasoning, at best, is inherently flawed, and that the flaws are accentuated when we act in groups. Such views are popular in government, and they shaped the initial response to Covid – with disastrous consequences.
Remember “behavioural fatigue” – the notion that people would lack the psychological resilience to cope with stringent measures? This contributed to the delay of the first lockdown. Yet concerns that the masses wouldn’t measure up were ill-founded. The common threat of Covid led people to develop a shared identity based around community. People became more concerned about the fate of others, which was reflected in enduring levels of adherence to stringent restrictions – even though, by following the lockdown rules, many suffered considerable hardships. Resilience, it turned out, was not something people lacked, but something that arises when people think and act as a group.
For many, though, that realisation came too late. It has been estimated that, had Britain locked down a week earlier, it could have saved more than 30,000 people. Two weeks, and up to 40,000 more people would have survived. The cost of pessimistic individualism was ultimately measured in tens of thousands of lives.
The Covid response of the UK government was shot through with the notion that we, the people, were very much part of the problem. Disdain was the defining feature of the Johnson government’s approach, visible in his refusal to be candid about the challenges we faced, in the policy of blame and punishment for those breaking the rules, and in the government’s refusal to engage with communities and provide them with the resources they needed to comply with the rules. It was perhaps best encapsulated by Matt Hancock’s explanation for why the government repeatedly refused calls to increase support for self-isolation: because people would game the system.
The story of Covid is one of an opportunity missed through ideological myopia. Far from being a problem, the public were the best asset the government had in dealing with the pandemic. Rather than harnessing that asset, ministers ignored and undermined it. They did so precisely because of their fear of the masses. So, for me, the big issue to come out of Covid is the need to rethink the relationship between the individual and the collective. Far from eroding our rationality, the group empowers us, makes us agents of our own fate and provides resilience in hard times. If we don’t understand that, we will have learned nothing from Covid, and the next pandemic response will be as much of a shambles as the last.
Professor of psychology at the University of St Andrews and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy
Is it time for the big Covid novel?
It’s been five years since the start of the Covid pandemic, and yet there have been few novels grappling explicitly with its impact. Earlier this year I was speaking to the Norwegian author Helga Flatland about her novel Toxic, at the Kerala literature festival. It struck me that hers was one of the few books I’ve read that firmly locates itself in that specific era. The events are set in motion by the first lockdowns: the protagonist moves from Oslo to the countryside, and the novel is punctuated with Zoom calls, bubbles and online classes.
In Toxic the pandemic is present, rather than viewed from a distance. But then, where are the big novels reflecting on what the experience has taught us, shown us? Has it even taught us anything, seeing as it seems our position, as a society, is mostly one of denial? Talking about “pandemic literature” as a concept also makes it seem as if it’s over, when the lives of many people continue to be irrevocably altered by Covid. There’s a clear beginning, but no definitive ending. Five years, in this context, seems like no time at all.
I spoke to my editor, Hermione Thompson, editorial director at Hamish Hamilton, who agreed that it just still might be too soon. “We start trying to make sense of an event from the moment it kicks off, and art which comes out of that white heat of experience can be incredibly powerful,” she said. “But you have to wait a bit longer – often a lot longer – for the wider picture to come into focus. And once you can see it, perhaps you have to wait a while more before you can bear to actually look at it.” Her submission pile is full of escapist stories. Readers, she told me, perhaps want “to be taken as far away as possible from the frightening prospect of reality”.
Perhaps it makes sense to think of Covid’s impact on fiction as something more abstract. I’ve come to see my third novel, Cursed Bread, as a pandemic novel of sorts, though it’s set in 1950s France, against the background of a mass poisoning. This appealed at the time, allowing me to escape as I wrote it in a frantic burst of energy between January 2020 and January 2021. But you can’t shut out the world entirely, and it was only afterwards that I saw obvious influences: a novel about desire in which the protagonist is hardly touched, the impact of collective trauma, a feverish claustrophobia.
Thompson singled out Ali Smith’s Companion Piece, and last year’s Booker prize winner, Orbital, as standout novels inspired by the experience of lockdown. But my favourite Covid novel is Burntcoat by Sarah Hall – released in October 2021, a mere 18 months after that first lockdown. Eerily prescient in its portrayal of a virus that lingers in the body, it’s also expansive, asking questions about art, love and creation in the face of disaster. Written in that aforementioned “white heat”, it didn’t wait for the event to feel distant, but captured that strange time as it happened – and perhaps in that state of rawness yielded something that felt more true and significant.
Author whose debut novel, The Water Cure, was longlisted for the 2018 Booker prize
Partygate was the perfect scandal to mobilise resentment of a remote and arrogant political class
What politicians do is generally more important than where they do it. But the pandemic brought an unusual focus on the spaces where power is wielded – the rooms where stuff happened; how many people were there; whether what they were doing counted as work under lockdown regulations. Those questions, and Boris Johnson’s inability to give straight answers, ended up being more consequential for politics than the deadly effects of the virus itself.
It was not the cost of bad decisions made in No 10 that brought down the prime minister, but the after-hours parties in the same building. Both failings were twin expressions of Johnson’s disorderly character. A leader with an ethical compass who exuded professional discipline by day would not have generated a workplace culture that licensed rowdy piss-ups by night.
Partygate was explosive because it made a mockery of millions of sacrifices by law-abiding citizens who had answered the call of duty to suspend their own needs, to forgo weddings, birthdays, funerals, in a communal struggle against the virus. It was the perfect scandal to mobilise resentment of a remote and arrogant political class that doesn’t feel bound by rules it imposes on everyone else.
This was hardly a new sentiment. But it was intensified by feelings of betrayal after the initial phase of the pandemic, which had been marked by a spirit of national solidarity. The prime minister benefited from that mood. His poll ratings were not dented by fatal early policy vacillations. His popularity peaked around the time that he was personally incapacitated by Covid.
Johnson’s landslide victory in the 2019 general election, on a pledge to “get Brexit done”, conveyed a strong public appetite for calmer, less ferociously partisan politics. The first lockdown effectively delivered just that. The enabling law – monumentally draconian for a democracy – was bundled through parliament in four days. The famously raucous Commons chamber was muted by social distancing strictures. Chronic dysfunction at the centre, wasteful misallocation of resources, lethal hesitation and divisions over strategy – these didn’t go unreported. There were intimations of the coming unravelling, not least in the furore around Dominic Cummings’s notorious excursion to Barnard Castle. Politics was not suspended. But it was muted for months. With Partygate, the staggering degeneracy of Johnson’s regime was vomited before the public gaze.
The scale of administrative dysfunction and the deficit of accountability were functions of a political culture that resists modernisation, venerates dilettantism and conflates rhetorical dexterity with judgment. When Britain needed serious, sober leadership, it found itself at the mercy of inadequate, clownish whimsy. That was a tragedy but not an accident; a feature of the system, not a bug.
The debauching of Downing Street during lockdown was unlawful and the prime minister’s dishonest denials put him in contempt of parliament. Those were the technical offences that finished his career. But the true penalty is still being paid by everyone else. It is measured in heightened cynicism and depleted trust in governing institutions that need to command public confidence for democracy to function.
Guardian columnist and leader writer
As Chinese factories closed, the fragility of global trade was revealed
Suzhou, a city in eastern China, is where the world’s technology is made. Its factories produce products for companies such as Foxconn and Samsung, and are staffed by millions of labourers, mostly migrant workers from rural China. In late January 2020, Suzhou’s municipal government, following Beijing’s orders, took the unprecedented step of extending the lunar new year holidays and delaying the return of migrant workers. Transport in and out of China slowed to a crawl. Factory towns, including Suzhou, closed. While media coverage of lockdowns focused on their human impact, the pandemic transformed supply chains, and had a huge impact on global trade.
At sea, ships were in effect stranded; with ports closed, there was nowhere to dock their cargo. International maritime treaties dictate that seafarers shouldn’t spend more than 11 continuous months at sea. According to the International Maritime Organization, the number of sailors working long after the end of their contracts rose to 400,000. Some remained on their ships for more than 22 months, wandering the world’s seas with no end in sight. On land, last-mile logistics drivers delivering food and groceries were designated as frontline workers. In Britain, along with nurses and bus drivers, they were among the largest group of workers who became ill with Covid.
Not everyone suffered from the effects of the virus. Shipping companies sought subsidies from governments, even as increased demand for goods meant their rates rose to their highest in history, netting them eye-watering profits. Because Chinese trade slowed, so too did the production, sale and export of personal protective equipment (PPE) beyond the Chinese border. Spying an opportunity, charlatans with excellent connections to the British government set up companies to provide PPE, and cleaned up on lucrative contracts for often defective or even nonexistent products.
The week-long closure of the Suez canal in March 2021 by a ship run aground had little to do with Covid-19, but only confirmed the fragility of the ostensibly efficient and frictionless global logistical routes that defined our world. This realisation compelled some European and US corporations to shift their factories nearer to home, to the peripheries of Europe or the Mexican borderlands. The US had already been threatening a trade war with China long before the slowdown, and “nearshoring” neatly fitted with this new strategic posture.
During his first term as president, Donald Trump blamed the pandemic on alleged biological warfare by the Chinese government. In his second term, some of the stories he spun back then can be marshalled for a new purpose. Capitalism’s common features – the offshoring of industry, the outsourcing of labour and the skyrocketing costs of shipping – can now be blamed on a nefarious Chinese agenda. As Trump effects a flurry of executive orders implementing tariffs against China and many other trading partners, we’re seeing the new era of trade that Covid helped to accelerate.
Professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London and author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula
The pandemic unmasked denial and resentment towards disabled people
My earliest memory is the tins of peas. A couple of weeks into the first Covid lockdown, I was getting used to being stuck at home 24/7. Like millions of other clinically vulnerable people, the shielding programme meant I wasn’t even supposed to go to the shops for fruit and veg (or gin). In the back of the cupboard, I was relieved to find some vitamins and, with them, a shred of hope.
It was a hard time for many, of course, but a few things made it easier. With theatres and the pub closed, entertainment was beamed remotely to our front rooms – access many disabled people had long dreamed of. At the same time, the public were taking Covid protections – from masks to testing – that helped keep those of us at high risk as safe as we could be.
Five years on, I would like to say such progress continued but I think we all know that would be a lie. Remote access to social and cultural events has largely been revoked now non-disabled people no longer need it. While WFH has been normalised, it’s repeatedly dismissed as an excuse to skive.
Since the last legal Covid protections were removed in 2022, clinically vulnerable people have been left with the “choice” of in effect shielding indefinitely or risking our lives each time we go out. Many disabled readers have told me they no longer feel able to do simple things like have a pint with a friend. Others with long Covid have lost jobs and relationships. The “return to normal” did not include everyone.
It isn’t simply that the things that helped clinically vulnerable people to stay safe have gone – there’s pushback to the idea that we even deserve them. Simply wearing a mask ourselves in 2025 – let alone asking someone else to – is enough to get yelled at by a stranger in Tesco. It feels at times as if the pandemic unmasked (no pun intended) a blend of denial and resentment towards disabled people, as if our needs are simultaneously a reminder of a time society would rather forget, and evidence of a sense of entitlement from an uppity minority. As one district nurse told me last year when I asked if she would mind testing for Covid before she came to my home if I gave her a lateral flow test: “It isn’t for people like you to tell us what to do.”
Whether it’s anger over the benefits bill or a bus having a priority wheelchair space, there’s a longstanding prejudice that disabled people are costly and demanding when all we are asking is to be able to live. In that way, the pandemic didn’t change negative attitudes towards disability – it just exacerbated them.
It’s natural to want to gain from a bad situation, as if all the pain wasn’t for nothing. Perhaps, though, real progress comes in being honest: in saying we tried for equality and solidarity but fell short. It is only in admitting our shortcomings as a country that we will ever do better for disabled people – to figuratively dig in the back of the cupboard together and find the peas.
Guardian columnist and author of Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People
Online teaching has made education more atomised and mechanical
From time to time, a student contacts me having found a relic from the 2020-2021 academic year. Not some social distancing tool, although campuses still have plastic screens that haven’t yet been disposed of, or the bits of gaffer tape on carpet that students were instructed not to cross.
No, these students have come across some actual treasure: a lecture video, still stored in the cloud, but no longer accessible. The question is: since they can’t attend a lecture, can I release the video instead?
There are usually practical reasons why not. Lectures change from year to year. But the bigger question this poses is what is the case for in-person attendance in the first place? Universities made it through the pandemic thanks to digital platforms and “edtech”. The difficulty is how to put the genie back in the bottle, and resuscitate what made a campus a valuable space of congregation in the first place. As in schools, falling student attendance levels are one of the many scars left by Covid-19.
Putting the other mental-health legacies of lockdowns to one side for a moment, they also triggered a social crisis: for a period of time, it became possible, necessary and – to some extent – convenient to live your life from your bedroom. With that option established, busy corridors, lecture halls and conversational seminars may seem confusing and sometimes even threatening.
What’s more, there is no question that for a generation raised with YouTube and smartphones it makes perfect sense to “consume” a lecture at the time, place and even speed of one’s choosing. Note-taking can become verbatim with the availability of closed captioning. How does a university or individual lecturer stand in the way of this without merely seeming conservative or obstructive?
There are plenty of valid benefits of a thriving campus and classroom, such as forging identities, making friends or participating in sports and political campaigns. Universities are now at pains to emphasise these, seeking to make their campuses more “sticky” via the introduction of additional cafes, social spaces and gyms.
But at some point, the pedagogical question needs to be confronted: why can’t we just release a load of content? Profit-hungry edtech providers and the consultants hoovering up fees in the current maelstrom of cost-cutting won’t want the question to die. The answer ultimately lies in cultivating in students a tolerance for ambiguity – the ambiguity of social space, the ambiguity of exactly what a lecturer (or text) meant, and the ambiguity of what counts as a “good” argument or essay.
At risk of romanticising the experience of in-person teaching and learning, it offers at its best a kind of collective holding environment in which it is OK to be uncertain or ignorant about things, safe in the knowledge that this uncertainty and ignorance will gradually recede. A teaching space contains all sorts of relationships, both tacit and formal, that ensure learning is never a simple transaction or transmission of information. In such communities, not everything is divided into “correct” and “incorrect” answers.
For a period of time, Covid inserted a digital interface into billions of social relations, turning educational exchange into a type of game, in which there are “moves”, “scores” and “results”, but no productive ambiguity. This was a disaster for the young people who became trapped in bedrooms, with their education reduced to mechanical inputs and outputs. The struggle to reverse this continues.
Sociologist and political economist. His latest book is Unprecedented? How Covid-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy
We want to forget it ever happened. Instead, we should be preparing for the next one
I recently had to teach master’s students about the pandemic and could feel my heart rate quicken at the prospect. “Collective amnesia” is the best way to describe how the world has since decided to approach Covid. We’d rather forget the initial fears about the disease, the trauma of hearing the daily death toll, the rainbow signs in windows and the lockdowns.
If you survived, it’s easy to look back and think it wasn’t that bad. Those who died aren’t around to contribute their views, although their loved ones have made powerful interventions. A colleague who lost his 34-year-old son in 2021 reminded me that these voices aren’t heard enough. More than 230,000 people in the UK have lost their lives to the disease.
This is how I narrate what occurred during the pandemic. In 2020, governments that had a consistent message and coherent plan – such as Sweden and South Korea – used public health measures such as mass testing, masks and awareness campaigns, and didn’t have to resort to severe interventions, or even lockdowns. In the summer of 2020, trial data indicated we would soon have vaccines. At this point, every country should have been trying to buy time before the vaccines could be rolled out, using tests to identify cases and stop chains of infection. Doing this without causing significant disruption to education, society and the economy was a huge challenge. Some countries and regions managed to strike the right balance. Others did not.
Once vaccines arrived in December 2020, the objective shifted. Instead of just containing the spread of Covid-19, health authorities began trying to vaccinate people as quickly as possible. Countries that pivoted quickly to this strategy, such as New Zealand and South Korea, managed to avoid major loss of life. Those that continued trying to contain the virus without promoting vaccines across their populations, such as China and Hong Kong, suffered a delayed wave of Covid cases and a high death toll.
As a public health expert, a lingering question I now ask myself is whether something like this could happen again, within our lifetimes. Avian flu is spreading across the US and infecting birds and cows. Meanwhile, an unidentified illness found in bats in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has already killed more than 50 people. Both of these examples show that outbreaks are inevitable and unpredictable. It would be over simplistic to claim that, as a society, we overreacted to Covid. Instead, we should be focusing on how we can prevent a similar pandemic from occurring again.
Avian flu is currently one of the most concerning diseases. If it begins to spread among humans, and carries a high fatality rate, governments won’t need to ask people to stay home. Those people will look around at their loved ones, hear what’s happening to families and in hospitals, and make decisions about their safety for themselves. That’s why collective amnesia is the wrong response to Covid. No matter how much we might wish to forget it ever happened, we should now be focusing on building resilience for the next pandemic, and investing in science, particularly vaccine programmes. That would be a far better way to honour the legacy of those who died from this disease.
Chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)
Mutual aid groups thrived in the face of state indifference – and many still do
The stats alone show us the significance of Covid mutual aid groups. By April 2020, a month after Britain’s first national lockdown was announced, a network of about 4,000 mutual aid groups was up and running. One survey in May that year reported that 10 million people in the UK were involved in some form of volunteering in response to the pandemic. Analysis of the impact of these groups has appraised them as having been essential in keeping society’s most vulnerable afloat during the Covid crisis. Mutual aid plugged a giant hole left by a seemingly indifferent and incompetent government, whether by providing food deliveries, prescription-runs and dog-walks, or casting a mental safety net to the lonely and isolated, with regular check-ins across a (socially distanced) doorstep.
Mutual aid, a term coined by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, is a hyperlocal system of support premised on the slogan “solidarity not charity”. It is about horizontal, two-way support: the idea that we all gain from helping each other because humans are wired to collaborate and connect; to participate and to share. It is fundamentally a political idea, even if not always articulated that way by those involved. When I interviewed mutual aiders across the country, volunteers often described it as providing meaning and purpose in a way that regular paid work did not.
While these groups were at their peak, there was talk of society being rebuilt from the bottom up, the process itself creating a new collective push for a different kind of party politics. It didn’t really turn out that way, even though mutual aid itself did not go away when the worst of the pandemic died down. A report in 2022 suggested that four in 10 of the mutual aid groups set up during the pandemic were still going, with many focused on helping communities cope with the cost of living crisis. Today, we still see versions of mutual aid everywhere, from disaster-relief groups dealing with the fires that raged across Los Angeles, to the networks providing food, medical relief and safe zones in response the humanitarian catastrophe of Sudan’s war. It springs up whenever a crisis meets an inadequate state response.
In other words, mutual aid still thrives precisely because it is a way for people to connect and do something in response to multiple, spiralling global crises, even as they grow increasingly disengaged from party politics. It is both the failure of and alienation from big “P” politics that drives support for mutual aid, as governments do not meaningfully address the climate emergency or redress terrible social iniquities. It’s hard to see how the dots between community organising and political pressure might connect. But perhaps that is to miss the point of mutual aid. The shift is in the tissue of the relationships forged, the practice of accountability to each other. Amid a global surge in far-right politics premised on competitive individualism, mutual aid builds awareness that societies can instead be founded on collectivism – and those that do will thrive.
Author of Not the Enemy – Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands and Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism
Working from home was supposed to be a revolution – but it mostly benefited men
Women’s working lives changed after March 2020 in complicated ways. Many found themselves on the frontline of the NHS. In other sectors historically dominated by women, such as retail and hospitality, workers were imperilled by restrictions, and millions were furloughed. Meanwhile, school and nursery closures meant that frazzled mothers now had to juggle Zoom calls with round-the-clock childcare.
Five years on, how does the picture look for working women? As a historian, it is hard to resist comparisons with an earlier crisis, the second world war, which mobilised millions of women and helped kickstart the dramatic growth in their employment that swept the second half of the 20th century. Covid hasn’t done anything like that. On the eve of the virus, the female employment rate was high – 72% – and it has barely changed since.
But that headline figure may mask the effects of the pandemic on older women, thousands of whom have moved out of the workforce into early retirement, or are now classed as “economically inactive”. This trend has also affected men, but women’s reasons for not being in work are more likely to include caring for family or long-term illness, including long Covid, of which there are more female sufferers than male.
These numbers also conceal the pressures experienced by mothers who are barely hanging on to their jobs owing to the lack of affordable childcare. The UK’s problems with childcare did not start in 2020, but the chaos of lockdowns exacerbated staff shortages. Many workers left the sector for more stable and less stressful jobs, and costs have continued to spiral.
At the start of the pandemic, there were hopes that the pivot to remote working would help working parents achieve a better balance by cutting out the commute and giving them more control over their time. Before 2020, only one in eight workers reported working from home. That figure has now risen to two in five. Here, there’s an echo of the second world war, when part-time shifts were promoted to sceptical employers as a means of recruiting housewives to munitions factories that desperately needed labour. By the 1980s, about a third of working-age women were employed part-time.
Those jobs were typically low-skilled, low-paid and carried fewer rights than full-time jobs. Today’s hybrid workers, by contrast, are more likely to be well-paid professionals. They are also more likely to be men. Initially, there was a sense that fathers would embrace equal, hands-on parenting styles if they spent more time at home. If anything, workplace inequalities have persisted. True, some mothers in white-collar occupations have undoubtedly benefited from hybrid working. But much larger numbers of women remain in jobs that are less amenable to home-based work, including those in hospitals, care homes and supermarkets. It is cruelly ironic that one of the few positive legacies of the pandemic is mostly unavailable to those whose essential labour got Britain through the crisis.
Historian and author of Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood
Conspiracy theories have moved from the fringes of society to the centres of power
In July 2023, the US politician Robert Kennedy Jr was filmed saying that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that the US “put hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes”. Now, in February 2025, Kennedy is US health secretary. It is a stark example of a much broader phenomenon: in the five years since the Covid pandemic began, conspiracy theories have moved from the fringes of society to the centres of power.
During the pandemic, more people began to doubt authorities, expertise and elites. Populist movements, including some explicitly rooted in conspiracies, already existed before Covid – but the pandemic significantly broadened their appeal. QAnon began in 2017, as a response to (false) claims that Hillary Clinton was the leader of an elite cabal of paedophiles, but by 2020, its supporters were campaigning against masks and vaccines. This is indicative of the way in which conspiracy movements adapt and cross-pollinate; during the pandemic, we also saw longtime conspiracy grifters such as David Icke and Piers Corbyn taking on Covid as a cause, as that’s where a new audience lay.
When I reported on the rise of Covid conspiracies in the miserable locked-down spring of 2021, it struck me that many of the people I spoke to had started with reasonable concerns. They were isolated, angry, and suffering financially and emotionally as a result of lockdowns. They had a sense that something wasn’t right, and the idea that the pandemic was being exaggerated, or was cover for something more sinister, provided an explanation. (As the writer Naomi Klein has said: “Conspiracy culture gets the facts wrong, but the feeling is right.”) I spoke to some people over the course of a few months, and as they became more immersed in the online world of conspiracies, their initial views became more extreme – perhaps a shift from questioning the origins of the pandemic to full-blown vaccine scepticism. “I’ve definitely fallen out with the government, and I will never, ever trust them again,” one woman told me.
The pandemic vastly expanded the number of people who feel this way. As a general rule, once someone has engaged fully in one set of conspiracy theories, investing time and energy in them, and probably losing real-world friends in the process, they become more receptive to other conspiracies too. And those who peddle these theories online adapt their views according to what is most popular or expedient. People who came to prominence talking about the pandemic have since moved on to other issues, taking their audience with them. A number of British Telegram groups set up during the pandemic to oppose lockdowns and vaccinations have switched to far-right messaging, for instance.
The pandemic and associated lockdowns may have receded from the public imagination, but people who really bought into the conspiracies swirling around it haven’t gone back to thinking how they did before. In an increasingly fragmented media environment, and with conspiracists sitting in positions of huge political power in the US, this is a problem for us all.
Journalist and the author of Karachi Vice
The NHS transformed for the better. It has since regressed
Almost exactly five years ago, Dave Jones, an ICU consultant in Wales, posted a tweet that made NHS colleagues cheer. “The NHS reminds me of a hippopotamus. It might sometimes appear slow, maybe a bit bloated and somewhat unresponsive. But my god, this last week or so has shown that like a hippo, it can move bloody fast and have some awesome power when it needs to.”
He had captured brilliantly the breakneck transformation – unprecedented in NHS history – of every inch of the health service to cope with the onslaught of Covid. Hospitals ripped up the rules and demolished conventions to double or treble their ICU capacities. In under a month, 33,000 extra patient beds were created – the equivalent of building 53 new district general hospitals across the country. Barriers dissolved, silos vanished. Red tape – this time of the literal kind – suddenly reconfigured our A&E into “hot” and “cold” zones – the kind of thing that in the NHS normally takes 26 committees and two years to achieve. Money and bureaucracy, for once, were no object. We all worked together to do what was right.
What shocks me today is how little of that mind-blowing dynamism remains. Then, staff were unleashed to transform our systems to help patients. Now, we’re back in the old quagmire of inertia, bureaucracy and system-says-no because there’s no money to do anything differently. A new government has promised an NHS revolution, but patients are still dying on trolleys in corridors. Social care – yet again – isn’t a government priority. Trusts still can’t, or won’t, pay for doctors to fill the rota gaps to keep patients safe at night. Staff struggle against the system to give patients the care they deserve.
In particular, it astounds me that five years after an airborne virus wreaked such deadly havoc, NHS England has failed to act on all the lessons learned. This winter, NHS leaders loudly blamed a viral “quad-demic” for the appalling crisis conditions in our hospitals, as though somehow natural forces had tied the government’s hands. Yet three of those four viruses – influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and Covid-19 – are spread through the air.
Why haven’t Hepa filters been installed in all our hospitals and GP surgeries when we know they effectively remove the virus particles breathed in by staff and patients? Where were the universal mask mandates for staff to help reduce the spread? Why was the default mask for staff the flimsy paper variety, not the significantly more protective FFP2 kind? It is surely the falsest of economies to stick to cheap paper when you know this will lead to higher rates of staff infection, endangering patients and causing staff to be too unwell to work.
As the Covid inquiry creaks on, I have been unnerved to find myself agreeing with Dominic Cummings’s testimony. Cummings has excoriated the groupthink, inertia and monolithic assumptions that dominate the actions of government, the civil service and the NHS. He’s right. We often talk about those electrifying months, five years ago, when we were liberated – and supported – to make the radical changes our patients needed. If only the same were true now.
Palliative care doctor and the author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
