Lessons of lockdown – did we get it right?
Second draft of history: what lessons are there from the extraordinary experience of the last two years? This week Reaction marks the lifting of the final Covid-19 restrictions in England with an assessment by our writers of how the lockdown and the pandemic reshaped our politics, medicine and attitudes to risk.
Just before the first lockdown in Britain, as much of Europe went into various versions of national quarantine, it felt inevitable that the rather queasy atmosphere of early March would be the prelude to some form of lockdown. I attended an international rugby match in a full stadium on March 8 2020 and I have never seen anything quite like those rows of middle-aged men in the communal loos frantically scrubbing their hands at the half-time interval. Our half-in half-out “flatten the curve” strategy did not seem to match the scope of the drama unfolding across northern Italy, where the health system had come under the most severe pressure, and a mounting sense of mayhem was taking hold across global financial markets.
The advent of the furlough scheme, where grants were made to employers to pay staff up to 80% of their wages, and stay-at-home orders were enforced across the entire territories of nation-states (travel bans were to come later) marked a rapid shift in the initial British response to the spread of infection. In Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s budget speech on March 11, the main components of financial support were geared towards small businesses struggling with employee absence and widening eligibility to Statutory Sick Pay to people self-isolating without necessarily being ill. By June 2020, according to the House of Commons Library, 21% of all employers had at least one employee on the scheme.
In the first few weeks of isolation, I remember turning to the “set texts” of infectious disease – Albert Camus’s The Plague, in particular. I was not alone – sales of La Peste skyrocketed in the months that followed the onset of lockdowns in the West. Camus portrays doctors telling politicians that yes, really, it is going to get that bad. Characters have debates over the “true” fatality numbers. The citizens of Oran, the plague-struck city on the coast of north-west Algeria, try to work around travel bans and enforced quarantines. All straightforwardly applicable to our very own mini-plague.
And yet, more interesting are the discontinuities between the Camus “playbook” and our own experience of lockdown. Camus might know the lingo of disease prevention but his history of disease is a mish-mash. City-wide quarantines of the type he describes, lasting for months, are a medieval tool. Plague barely figures in the 20th-century history of disease. Indeed, for Camus, the plague was really a prism through which to think about the condition of Occupied France: “I want to express by means of the plague the stifling air from which we all suffered and the atmosphere of threat and exile in which we lived.”
We went back to the literature of disease and the history of disease prevention to try to think through the measures that were imposed on the population and which were of a piece with a time-hallowed rulebook. Opinion pieces proliferated about the “mask wars” in the US during the Spanish Flu pandemic. The novelist Proust, who confined himself to a cork-lined room for years to escape the threat of disease, was dubbed by one commentator as “the original master of social distancing”.
And yet, the successive lockdowns that took place throughout the globe in 2020 and 2021 were quite without parallel in human history. Whole societies had never been placed under universal stay-at-home orders extending for several months. In September 2014 and March 2015, Sierra Leone went into two three-day long national lockdowns – in response to the September 2014 outbreak of Ebola. The BBC’s Umaru Fofana commented: “Never since the rebel invasion of Freetown in 1999 have I seen fear on the faces of people like in recent times. Even so, many people feel three days is too long to be asked to stay indoors.” Unlike many other African countries where longer lockdowns were imposed, Sierra Leone limited itself to two further three-day long national lockdowns in 2020 because of fears of the broader harms and the economic impact of shutdowns.
In the post-lockdown period, the debate has divided, in Camus’ terms, between those who believe that Covid (the disease) was responsible for the “stifling air from which we all suffered” and those who believe that it was more down to the lockdowns that an “atmosphere of threat” flourished in 2020.
This argument has at times resembled a kind of dialogue of the deaf. This is, in part, because the assumptions we bring to bear on the argument are inflected by the asymmetric dynamics of both the threat of disease itself and of the direct and indirect harms caused by lockdowns. Children and students faced the least direct harm from the virus, while schools and universities were just about the only places (along with nursing homes and prisons) where social distancing measures were genuinely enforced.
That the Downing Street operation found it hard to maintain blanket measures for extended periods of time is testament to how difficult that task has proved. And that is among a group of people who had very good incentives to stick to the rules they had imposed on others (potential exposure in the press and in Parliament not least among them). For the pressures which those at the heart of government faced – day-in day-out in close contact with colleagues of various risk profiles, various levels of exposure to the disease, plus the human need to socialise – read the pressures that the precariat class, who service the nuts and bolts of the modern economy, have endured throughout the pandemic era: cramped working conditions and housing, and jobs that cannot be conducted from the luxury of a home office.
We must work to understand the powerful discontinuities that the global response to the Covid pandemic has introduced into the course of modern history. In the absence of a readily available therapy or vaccine, we regarded the general confinement of the entire population (irrespective of risk profile, living situation, religion or age) as justified in light of the potential harms it faced. In its own terms, that bet eventually paid off. After the vaccines were developed and rolled out, many societies “opened up” for the vaccinated, while the non-vaccinated segment of the population remained constricted in their activities.
Both aspects of the story illustrate the complex legacy of this coalition of the forces of science and the modern state that the crisis has brought into being. At times, it has done us a great service. At points, especially when it has felt itself unchecked by pushback from the media and civil society, it has done us great harm. In this sense, the pandemic has resembled less the pandemics of the past than a war or a period of intense rivalry between powers – populations have been mobilised and money has flowed towards key industries just as in times of general conflict.
Much like in wartime, the human element has found itself obscured. The activities of the general populace are fitted to neat curves. Roadmaps are drawn up. Press conferences delivered. Travel bans and constrictions on movement are imposed, lifted, and re-imposed.
But in telling the story of the Covid pandemic, we have to return to this vital human element. We have to get beyond a sterile argument rooted in pro- or anti-lockdown positioning and work out what was distinctive about what we did, what was wholly new, and what all that says about the time in which we live.
And in this project of living with disease and under the shadow of death, we also have to recognise and confront what was in fact age-old about our response – the things that make us much like every generation that has ever lived.