Lockdown Lamentations: Five Years of Lessons We Can’t Forget

Five years on from the whole COVID debacle - i.e the spread of not only the virus itself but the stunning overreaction to it - it seems like the world has, in many ways, forgotten about it. Yet it is unlikely a world event within the next century will come to shape our planet as much as the Coronavirus and its impact. With it came the closing of schools and the mandating of mask wearing: the infringing of our civil liberties.

Now, you could say that locking your grandma in her home for ‘her own good’ may have been in her, and the country’s, best interest. But, if this was the case - couldn’t she have made that decision for herself? As so typically in modern western democracies, self-responsibility is a virtue that few governments can comprehend. So in the name of ‘national security’ the UK and practically every country shut its borders, its schools, while its citizens sat at home and waited, and in the case of the UK, all while the Prime Minister threw parties at his gaff.

Simultaneously, the children of those countries, with school cancelled, sat at home, and engaged in ‘online learning’. Now, you’d be well-inclined to say that it was the elderly who suffered worst from lockdown, especially considering they were the age group most decimated following the outbreak. There is, though, bleak evidence to suggest it was the youngest generation who were hit the hardest. Due to the sudden and rapid nature of the closing of the schools, children were forced to adopt a new day-to-day regime that they weren’t used to. Many studies have shown this as, unsurprisingly, harmful. In Germany, during times of harsh lockdowns, many parents were surveyed on their childs’ experiences during them. It found that children aged 3-10 experienced significant stress, with older children being more emotional. Many experienced loneliness and parents worldwide expressed concern over the effect of lockdown on their children. 

The Educational impacts may have been far more deleterious though. Survey data often suggests that children, particularly young, have been held back a year, or even two, of social and emotional development due to the lack of nourishment they would have received had they’d been occupying a classroom full of other children their age, rather than their mums’ and dads’ kitchens on a zoom call. Worryingly, those are the more positive cases. UNICEF data from 2022 estimated that 463 million children globally couldn’t access remote learning during school closures, with the actual number likely higher due to inadequate technology or parental support. A 2021 World Bank study estimated $17 trillion in lost earnings globally from learning disruptions. In essence, lockdown anywhere may have been one of the most divisive socio-economic policies ever, particularly among children. The rich got smarter whilst the poor got dumber.

And what was it all for? So old Wynn in a Brighton care home, already moribund, could live a few more months at the monumental cost of the taxpayer? Staying on the topic of economics for just a minute, the UK economy shrank by 9.3% in 2020, the steepest decline in over 300 years. Across the pond, the U.S fared better, with only a shrink of 3.4% in the first year of the virus. While this looks acceptable on the surface, over 22 million jobs were lost in the United States from March to April 2020, a statistic that probably would have mopped Wynn’s old brow and sent her off to eternal sleep. 

A fair rebuttal to everything mentioned so far may be: “Well, we didn’t know any better at the time. The best option was to lockdown”. To which I’d say: perhaps. However, Sweden provides for a strong example of a proper, self-accountability focused governing during the pandemic. Crucially, the schools didn’t close and masks weren’t mandated. Ironically, Sweden’s hospitals held up without harsh laws. Sure, the death rate was one of the highest among Western-European nations; so was the importance placed on personal liberty. Yes, their economy still suffered, obviously - there was a pandemic occurring. But their economy was the only major economy in Europe to record GDP growth in the first quarter of 2020, with a slight increase of 0.1%, while the Eurozone saw a 3.6% contraction. Even when the pandemic hit them much harder during the second quarter, their GDP fell by only 8.6% compared to the UK’s (whose restrictions were far more stringent) -19.6%. 

A similar case was observed in Florida. Although regrettably, schools were temporarily closed for some months, businesses were allowed to remain open and the Governor, Ron DeSantis, emphasised Florida as a refuge from restrictive policies. As a result, Florida’s GDP took a hit in 2020, shrinking by 2.1% - less than the national decline of 3.4%. Interestingly, states like New York and California, where restrictions were much harsher, saw losses of 5.9% and 2.8% respectively. By June 2021, Florida’s employment had recovered to pre-pandemic levels, nine months ahead of the national average (February 2022). Now, Florida is ranked as the best economy in the most recent end of year rankings in 2024. Wherever you look, nations/states which pursued hard-line lockdown policies fared much, much worse than those who didn’t. 

So what did we learn from those strange and bewildering lockdown lamentations? Well, we learnt that under no circumstances ever again can we allow our future generations to be forbidden from actual education - in classrooms with other students. Not only will that cost them their future livelihoods but it will also cost the future economies of those countries tremendously. Furthermore, COVID-19 taught us how people can be made to be, not just scared of something, but to be absolutely petrified of it. Ask yourself how many people you still see wearing masks, even now, with the restrictions and threat of the virus firmly in the rearview mirror. It may not be a common enough occurrence for a person completely removed from polite society to think that the epidemic was still going on, but it's regular enough for it to still be bewildering, at least on a personal level.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, we learnt the importance of personal responsibility and to not let government’s get in the way of that. The second we begin to vest more and more power into central governing authorities is the second we lose our freedom, something that wars - time after time - have been fought over.