Terina Hine looks back at the Covid pandemic and its lasting impact

Great calamities bring change. Epidemic diseases devastated Indigenous American populations, paving the way for colonisation, cholera epidemics in the nineteenth century and revolutionised sanitation. And Covid?

Over 230,000 people in the UK lost their lives to Covid. Those who survived were keen to forget. Five years on, with so much back to normal, it’s sometimes hard to believe those momentous events happened at all. But they did, and normal is not quite what it was in 2019.

‘Next slide please’ was the daily soundtrack to empty apocalyptic streets, panic buying, lack of PPE, public figures losing jobs over illicit lockdown-breaking affairs, road trips to Durham and rose-garden humiliation, drunken Downing Street parties (although we didn’t know about those until later), zoom calls, bubbles, online classrooms, solitary funerals, fear, boredom and loneliness.

Now the majority of school pupils have returned to the classroom but the level of persistent truancy has shot up. The gap in attainment between the poorest and the rest, which had narrowed pre-pandemic, has now risen. Lack of support during school closures was a major impediment and the poorest children will live with its legacy throughout their education.

Digital learning is here to stay, especially at university level where online lessons and exams remain commonplace. Good for some, less good for others.

Office work has changed fundamentally. Hybrid working has reset the work-life balance and reduced the time and cost of commuting. Employers may harp on about bringing back the five-day office week, but this is met with such opposition, it’s unlikely to happen. A recent survey showed that more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies have adopted a hybrid arrangement. The three-day office week appears to be the norm, with companies tempting employees back with coffee hubs, pool tables and free food.

This change has had a knock on effect in city centres, but the so-called ‘hollowing out’ of cities is as much to do with changing shopping habits (exacerbated by Covid) and the unaffordability of housing as it is the new working week.

Key workers (in health, education, logistics), as well as those in hospitality are unable to work from home. Some did not survive Covid: many died or became sick and long Covid hinders their return to work, others balk at returning to high pressured environments with limited financial reward. The toll of this on recruitment and retention is enormous. Thousands have taken early retirement.

The NHS has suffered, its waiting lists grow, its services are strained to breaking point. Rather than tackle the cycle of poverty and ill health (mental and physical), the government denies it exists and victim blames: its only solution to a collapsing NHS is privatisation.

But it’s not just the NHS that’s collapsing, trust in politics has gone the same way.

Partygate saw levels of trust in politicians plummet. In the autumn of 2019, Boris Johnson was the saviour of the Tories, by spring 2022, he was its nemesis. The issue of trust came to be of far greater significance for Johnson’s fate than how he handled the pandemic itself.

The scale of political dysfunction exposed by partygate, on top of the PPE scandal, raised questions about the viability of democracy itself. A recent poll found one in five Generation Z and Millennial Britons preferred strong leaders without elections to democracy. The explosion of conspiracy theories is another symptom of the collapse in trust in the political elite and institutions of government.

Alongside the political upheaval, Covid exposed the fragility of our economic system. Just-in-time production, global trade and the free market were all found wanting. No longer is orthodox free-market economics the god of the global capitalist system. Production is shifting closer to home in both Europe and the US, and tariffs are undergoing a revival. The demise of our economic system, which began with the 2008 crash, has a large Covid shaped nail in its coffin.

Covid is over, but its impact is definitely still with us.

Terina Hine is the author of A People’s History of Covid, on sale now at the Counterfire shop.