Since we've all mostly memory-holed Covid, it's nice that the BBC is doing a five-year retrospective on lockdowns.
The article, however, doesn't have a lot of concrete takeaways. The main one is that countries that avoided lockdowns still lost lives just maybe not at the same time as those with strict lockdowns.
The trillion dollar policy question is whether that trade-off is worth it.
Reading the article inspired me to post an article I wrote four years ago about that first year of Covid in Cambridge. I just posted it here:
Revisiting UK Lockdown for Covid Five Years Ago
This piece was originally published as the cover articles to St Edmund’s College magazine The Editorial under the title “Cambridge under COVID: One Year of the Crisis.” The full magazine can be found here.
For us, Covid created a black hole that—professionally, educationally, and socially—our family has never fully emerged from. In-life social networks never really recovered. Covid lockdowns just destroyed so much.
In 2020, I was firmly in the sacrifice-for-the-common-good camp. Most everyone around us at the time felt the same way. In those first few months, it was exhilarating to see what we could all do when we acted in concert. But the feeling dissipated quickly, and the unity didn't last.
Even if the people around us supported us, every single institution in my life failed me and my family, starting with the United Kingdom (where we were living and where the rule-makers weren't even following the rules). On the whole, every single one failed. I was never a huge fan of some before Covid—I found them a mixed bag. Now, though, I don't trust any institution. And I'm not alone. You can see the effects everywhere.
I think the most depressing part about the institutional failure around Covid is that next time a big crisis happens—whether a pandemic or a war or AGI run amok or something else—it will be even harder for us to respond collectively. Whatever bad thing comes next will be even more disastrous than Covid.
It makes sense that we don't want to think about Covid. I know I just want to climb out of the crater it created for us. But just as the post-WWI roaring '20s fed into the Great Depression and political turmoil of the '30s, we also are blindly heading towards disaster.
I just don't know what exactly that disaster will be...