Last Sunday, the UK marked five years since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, with events including a ceremony on Glasgow Green. It is, of course, right that we marked this occasion, and we should continue to do so. It is estimated that Covid was a central or contributory factor in around 17,000 deaths in Scotland; this was a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe and we should never forget those who we lost during it.
Thankfully, the days of acute illness and death due to catching Covid are long behind us. However, the knock-on effects of Covid and, in particular, of lockdown, remain with us. As important as it is to remember and honour those who died at the time, it is important to be cognisant of the turmoil that Covid lockdowns continue to cause amongst large sections of the general population.
Scotland and the UK both do a good line in self-congratulation in many areas, but this peaked during and after the Covid pandemic, when we told ourselves that we made decisive, clear and strict decisions on Covid and saved lives as a result. This would be wonderful if there was a shred of evidence to back up the bravado, but sadly there is not.
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Indeed, the more time passes, the clearer it becomes that we made a series of decisions which were simultaneously lacking in an evidence base, highly restrictive and also largely ineffective.
Of course, governments were dealing with an unprecedented situation, exacerbated by poor advice and so, to a degree, can be forgiven for mis-stepping. However we should remember that not all governments made the same decisions, and not all experts here were advising our government to make these decisions.
For that reason, I must say I find it difficult to digest the narrative around Covid anniversaries without reflecting on what I believe we will remember as the most disfiguring public policy failure of our lifetime: the lockdowns.
The impact of lockdown has not gone away. It may never. Take working from home, for instance. The public sector, in particular those who do not have front-line roles, have become so used to working from home full-time that it has become normalised. Some public sector workplaces are practically empty, the output and efficiency of some workers going largely unnoticed, and the social and economic knock-ons are significant.
The impact of an absent public sector workforce, however, pales into insignificance compared to the impact that lockdowns have had on our future workforce of children and young people. The first time we closed down our schools, those who took the decision could, I suppose, be forgiven. It was the prevailing wisdom that schools could contribute to the spread of the disease, and in the very early days there was speculation that children could be "super-spreaders.
However this changed, rapidly. As Professor Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, has repeatedly said, it “quickly became apparent” that this prevailing wisdom was wrong. During the Covid inquiry, around a year ago, Professor Woolhouse went as far as to say that the continued closure of schools “wasn’t necessary and we did it anyway”.
All over the country, there are children still operating only at a fraction of themselves because of this. Children struggling with their emotions, struggling to develop resilience, struggling academically; all against a backdrop of the knowledge that, as Professor Woolhouse said, there was “pretty much zero public health benefit to keeping us indoors”.
This was a choice, let us remember, not a requirement. Not every country took the decisions we did when it came to our children and their schooling. In Sweden, for instance, the government decided that they could not justify the closure of schools because they had no data to support the theory that it would work. Concerned about the damage to children and the potential for the economy to collapse as a result of parents not working, the Swedes opted for lower-level mitigation. We castigated them, of course, and said they were taking an unacceptable risk. But Sweden’s Covid death rate was around 70 per cent of ours. We were the ones taking the unacceptable risk.
Next door, the Danes, like us, closed schools but then, unlike us, realised it was having no positive impact and reopened them almost immediately. Kids back to school, and parents back to work instead of trying to play maths teacher. Denmark’s Covid death rate was around half of ours.
Schooling in Scotland is already well behind that of our European neighbours. The prolonged school closure, combined with an apparent unwillingness to conduct any sort of academic "catch-up" on children’s return, and further combined with the crisis of mental wellbeing and resilience, leaves us in a sorry mess.
In his book The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir, Professor Woolhouse said:
“We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt. We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. In short, we panicked.”
This is not hindsight; it is clear that Professor Woolhouse’s advice was available at the time, but was ignored.
Our scientists, and in turn our politicians, made decisions which denied our older people time with their children and grandchildren. Decisions which denied working people the opportunity to make a living. Decisions which denied our economy the growth which pays for public services. Decisions which denied children the most basic rights, from which many have never recovered.
We should continue to mark Covid anniversaries. We should continue to remember those whom we lost. But we must never forget that decisions were made on our behalf which were not only wrong, but were also avoidable.
Let’s spare ourselves the self-congratulation. It is undeserved.
Andy Maciver is Founding Director of Message Matters, and co-host of the Holyrood Sources podcast
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