Britain still has long Covid but no one is talking about it… so says Sunday Times journalist Josh Glancy and I couldn’t agree more. I felt that I was in a tiny minority in the lockdown years because I profoundly disagreed with government policy, raged at the lack of holistic thinking about the likely consequences of lockdown, the shutting down of alternative opinions and most of all the collusion of all politicians. But what really disappointed me was the acceptance of farcical rules and total compliance to them by the majority of the British people. I found my tribe and sanity through social media, something I had used rarely before. I also had some like-minded friends who felt the same. It wasn’t just me but we were treated like social pariahs…
Why were other people not questioning a rule that said that six people was allowed but not seven? Or why they were allowed to go for one walk but not two? Why were we not allowed to use our own human concern and common sense for our elderly parents and act accordingly? Why were children and youth treated on a par with older adults when the risk of harm from the virus to them was astonishingly small? Why were we not given the easily available figures (ICNARC) for who was most at risk of serious illness i.e. middle aged overweight men, people with co-morbidities, the obese. We only knew old people were at risk. Why were we not told it was a respiratory illness and that we would all benefit from a daily dose of Vitamin D?
Instead taking advice from the likes of Professor Ferguson (who had failed miserably in his predictions some years before on swine flu and who broke lockdown rules himself) and who in his March 2020 paper said that as a democracy we probably wouldn’t follow China in setting a lockdown policy but then Italy did so ( yippee!) Britain could and should. The government ignored Anders Tegnell, chief medical officer in Sweden who stood apart and used evidence and not hysteria to advise on policy. It ignored the three public health scientists who published the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for ‘focused protection’ in October 2020 and allowed the media to undermine them. I could go on…
In this excellent article Glancy says what very few dare to say. That we were struggling from a number of issues before 2020 – a NHS that wasn’t fit for purpose for such an ageing population and advance in medicine, a financial system still suffering from the impact of the crash and subsequent quantitative easing, declining productivity from importing cheap labour and an increase in mental health issues of young people caused by use of mobile phones. But that government Covid measures massively accelerated all of these problems.
The government basically ground the economy to a halt, borrowing nigh on £300billion to pay people for not working, track and trace (hopeless), technology to monitor our compliance ie whether we were vaccinated or not, building hospitals they knew they couldn’t staff and on it went. A massive spending spree, a panic in the face of something they equated with a war. Even the language they used was warlike.. enemy, battle, victory etc.
An article in the Harvard Business Review written by Scott Berinato in 2020 identified that what we were feeling at that time was collective grief, both for loss of our everyday lives, loss of contact with friends and family but also a huge sense of uncertainty about the future and our safety.
This uncertainty and feeling of lack of safety were deliberately deployed by governments in their shameless policy of promoting fear to induce compliance, as advised by behavioural pyschologists ( A State of Fear by Laura Dodsworth)
We were fed a daily diet of death and disaster.
This period exaggerated a sense of the need for safety over risk and led to an over reliance on the government for our well- being. However if you take the government during the Covid period to be like a parent figure with the population its children, then like in David Winnicott’s theory of the good enough parent, the government failed in creating a safe enough holding environment for us to flourish. It created instead a sense of dependence. We are still living with that today.
The BIG question is why these consequences of lockdown are never referred by the government /politiicans or indeed by many journalists. Mind you, the latter were a massive disappointment too as they never openly questioned government policy at their briefings. The BBC became a mouthpiece for the government. The Covid era revealed the cosy relationship between government and tech companies, the latter becoming increasingly a vehicle for government control.
The Labour government is quick to blame the Conservatives on mismanagement of the economy but not the mismanagement of the Covid epidemic. Why? Because as the opposition party they supported every single measure and indeed want more and harder lockdowns. They all colluded.
Anxiety among the population is at an all-time high. Five years on from the first lockdown 4.5 million people are claiming some kind of sickness benefit, with around 1.4 million PIP recipients (England & Wales) citing mental health as their main condition in April 2025, a 70% jump from January 2020. Mental health conditions now make up about 39% of all PIP claims as of spring 2025, making it the largest disabling condition group. In the age group 16-24 a staggering 34% report anxiety/depression symptoms, with 41% for young women.
We have learned this week that over one million 16-24 year olds are neither in education nor the workforce… has the government considered that the impact of disrupted schooling and social development may have something to do with this.
A ferret around social media will produce hundreds of theories and experts on the role of trauma in anxiety yet I have yet so see many pinpoint the role of the collective trauma of lockdown on the nervous systems of the whole population (this is the topic of another post for later).
No one seems to want to talk about the impact of Covid but these are conversations we should be having because as Glancy says “Despite the pandemic’s continuing effects, it stays firmly lodged in our collective unconscious. But we should not leave it there. To paraphrase Carl Jung, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life — and you will call it fate.”