The pandemic and the economy – could we have done better?

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.

With a cosmopolitan population and a greater range of international links than virtually any other country and with much of the population concentrated in a small area in Southern England, you might expect that the economic performance of the UK should have been more severely impacted by Covid than most other countries. In fact, the performance has been about average so far and will probably move up the league table when the statistics get revised upwards as they often do, especially in periods of major change.

But the game is not over until it’s over.