Nearly gone, not forgotten
Coronavirus is top of mind for only 1 in 100 Britons but its effects are still being felt
You may have missed it. Last week (23 March) was the third anniversary of the start of the first UK-wide lockdown in response to Coronavirus. That it passed by with little fuss and attention is unsurprising given the other things ‘polycrisis’ Britain has got to worry about and a protective preference to put the pandemic firmly in the past.
Coronavirus was the most threatening, most terrifying public health crisis for 100 years. In Britain and elsewhere, it contributed to a sickening spike in excess deaths, a slowdown in life expectancy and had a ravaging effect on our economy. Its disruptive effects are still present in Britons’ lives and, just about, their minds if not, blissfully, in their bodies.
According to Ipsos’ monthly Issues Index — a barometer of national concerns — just one in a 100 Britons spontaneously mention it Coronavirus as one of the most important issues facing the country (lower than the estimated 1 in 40 people infected in England in mid-March). It was one in 16 on the second anniversary, one in two 12 months after the first lockdown.
This puts the salience of Coronavirus on a par with a range of very fringe issues; morality/individual behaviour/lifestyle, privatisation, nuclear disarmament, rural life and animal welfare. Of course, this dimming of concern reflects the declining prevalence of the virus. Tellingly, the final weekly ONS Infection Survey release was published on 24 March 2023.
Coronavirus may be close to endemic levels, but its effects are still being felt. While people attribute the difficulties facing the British economy to several factors — Brexit, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the state of the global economy and Trussonomics — what sits top? Coronavirus. Eight in ten Britons think it has contributed a great deal or a fair amount to the sluggish state of Britain’s economy.
It looms large in three other areas — the NHS, politics and public services. According to the latest British Social Attitudes Survey published last week, people are less satisfied with the NHS than they were before the pandemic. Analysis shows that waiting times have risen in prominence as a driver of dissatisfaction and, according to the BMA, more patients than ever are waiting for treatment. Strikes haven’t helped, but the backlog is a Covid backlog. Long-term sickness, including Long Covid, is an important reason for ‘economic inactivity’.
Ipsos doesn’t find the pandemic as readily blamed by the public for the decline in the NHS as other reasons including insufficient doctors and nurses, overworked, undertrained and underpaid staff, underfunding and government policies. But even if it was already unsteady on its feet, Covid brought the NHS to its knees.
It also did great harm to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives. He was seen as being good in a crisis. The public were positive about furlough and the vaccination programme. But Johnson’s personal brand weakened from late 2021 — around the time the Partygate scandal broke — after which the public came to see him as increasingly untrustworthy.
In this context, it was no surprise that the public saw being ‘an honest person’ as the most important character trait in a good Prime Minister following Johnson. Truss didn’t have time and was undone by incompetence, Sunak’s rebuilding is a work in progress.
State capacity has been put under strain by Covid across the world but especially so in Britain. Eight in ten people say they are worried that government and public services will do too little to help people in the years ahead, a higher proportion than citizens in other OECD countries.
There is significant public pessimism. In 2021, Ipsos found hedonistic sentiment among the UK public fell to its lowest level for 22 years. Briefly, there was some talk of a ‘Great unlock’ and the ‘Roaring twenties’ but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and cost-of-living crisis pushed Covid-hit Britain into the ‘twitchy twenties’ and a downbeat austerity more like the 1950s.
Thankfully, Covid is in abeyance. People don’t think about it half as much as they used to. That’s good news. But its ongoing impacts are not.
