Let’s remember lockdown so its madness is never repeated

Having moved recently, we’re just getting to know the new neighbours. One came round the other night and mentioned that it was the first time he had been in someone’s house without a mask. As he is a relatively young chap and apparently fit and healthy, this took me aback.

We had just been chatting about our own lockdown lapses — passing drinks across garden fences in the early days, mixing as soon as we could, and dispensing promptly with the mask mandate when (and sometimes before) the time came.

My husband was a shielder and high up the list for early vaccination, yet we were at the more relaxed end of the compliance spectrum. Downing Street has shown us what total disregard for the rules looked like, but there were plenty of interpretations in-between that and the other extreme, where face-covered loons jumped off pavements into traffic to avoid breathing the common air.

While some of us chose to push at the dafter strictures, many previously sensible folk lost all perspective. There were those (and still are) who shrunk from society and retreated into paranoia, like the dear friend who accused us of “killing people” after we ventured abroad, quite legally, in the summers of 2020 and 2021.

Even though it is barely a month since the final curbs were lifted in England, I had almost forgotten, until the other night and the neighbour, how divisive the pandemic had been and how hotly its measures (too much, not enough) were contested.

Wednesday, March 23, marked the second anniversary of the first Covid restrictions, and a National Day of Reflection was held to remember those who died, an official figure of 164,123, although even this is disputed territory and the debate rages on.

We should also pause to remember those who were vilified for foretelling the pains that lockdown would bring, and whose predictions — particularly about the repercussions for children and the underprivileged — are proving spot on.

Leading this pack was Professor Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist from Oxford, who said in 2020: “We can’t just think about those who are vulnerable to the disease. We have to think about those who are vulnerable to lockdown too.”

It was a controversial opinion at the time, but now that we’re living with the virus, and have moved beyond the panic, many people are reappraising the lockdown orthodoxy with an honesty that has been absent for two years.

Among them is Professor Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, who this week issued stark warnings about the fallout from those blanket regulations that he had such a hand in imposing.

Having stepped down from the Number 10 podium from where he and his Sage colleagues terrified the country every night, he accepts belatedly that children’s lives could be cut short because of lockdown-induced obesity.

A significant worsening of weight problems among children starting school, from 23 per cent before the pandemic to 28 per cent now, would increase their risk of strokes and heart attacks, as well as cancer and infectious diseases, including Covid, he said.

“We really need to make sure that whatever policies we bring forward are going to have their biggest effect in the areas which are most affected by this, because the long-term effects are going to be very considerable,” he told a virtual conference run by the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Public Health.

He also acknowledged the impact on children’s mental health, evident already with a rise in eating disorders, and said there could be long-term consequences.

But it wasn’t only children who had been damaged by lockdowns, said Whitty. The elderly, too, had suffered as a result of isolation. Well, naturally. People, obeying the harsh rules, were kept from their loved ones, but many were too frightened to visit aged parents even when they could. And there were aged parents who opted not to see their children and grandchildren, despite being protected by vaccines.

The legislation which removed our liberties was accompanied by such successful propaganda that people forgot what made life precious. I know I would have chosen contact over caution had I been in the high-risk group, but maybe some families found Covid a convenient excuse to stay apart.

Whitty is also worried about the cancer diagnoses missed when the NHS was focused on Covid alone — something other doctors, in particular the distinguished oncologist Karol Sikora, have been banging the drum about from the beginning.

Rates of depression also soared after the first lockdown, with diagnosed cases up from four to 32 per cent in 2020, and anxiety up from five to 31 per cent, according to a study by the University of Bath.

And then there is the economy. The shutdowns may not have been the only cause of the current cost of living crisis and mounting inflation – which of course will hit the poorest hardest – but they came at a hefty price, which the lockdown champions would do well to recognise.

Such cheerleaders are thin on the ground today, but their contributions — from apocalyptic modelling to authoritarian policing, to hysterical broadcasting — must be recorded for Covid posterity so can see what kind of country we became for two mad years and never again relinquish our freedoms so readily.