Forgetting Covid

Artefacts of the pandemic years

A great withdrawal into the private sphere may be Covid’s most significant legacy. (Image: World Animal Protection).

Occasionally I rifle through a messy drawer, or put my hand in the pocket of an old jacket, and discover a relic from a lost world: a surgical mask, a bottle of hand sanitiser, a record of vaccination, some paraphernalia from a testing kit. For two years, the years of Covid, these unloved items and the rituals surrounding were a constant part of our lives. They were grafted onto our daily habits until they became almost as ordinary as buying milk or putting the bins out. And then – at least for most of us, at least in Britain – they disappeared as quickly as they had arrived.

Five years after the spread of a “novel coronavirus” turned the world upside down, it is almost never mentioned. In fact, the same was true after three years. A genuinely historic event that brought some degree of misery to practically every person on the planet has vanished from public memory, like a stone dropped into deep water. The consequences of the pandemic, and of the measures taken in response to it, are everywhere of course: the lost loved-ones, the wrecked educations, the deepened dependencies on digital devices, the government debt burdens which are now placing such stress on politics around the world. But if people remember what caused these enormous dents in the social fabric, they rarely seem to mention it. Stickers managing foot-traffic and reminding us to “socially distance” still cling to the floors of supermarkets and stations, though we no longer notice them.

Or if you want a still clumsier metaphor, look at the enormous stockpile of medical aprons found rotting near a caravan park in the New Forest, Hampshire, in 2023. It was part of £1.4 billion worth of personal protective equipment from a single government contract which, it emerged last year, had been shipped from China but never reached the hospitals and clinics where it was needed. Much of it has now been incinerated. Already in 2022, a parliamentary committee reported that “the Department for Health & Social Care lost 75% of the £12 billion it spent on personal protective equipment in the first year of the pandemic to inflated prices and kit that did not meet requirements.” Such incompetence is especially bitter to contemplate in a week when the government has announced deep cuts to social spending, including personal independence payments for the disabled.

Maybe there is no amnesia regarding Covid; maybe it is just a case of life moving on, and the pointlessness of dwelling on painful memories. Yet I do suspect the pandemic revealed aspects of the modern state and society that we have been unable, collectively, to digest, preferring to act as though we never witnessed them in the first place. We learned that an atmosphere of emergency, together with the coordinating powers of contemporary media, can rapidly mobilise an atomised, laissez-faire society into a highly obedient and passionately conformist one. Whatever one thinks about the necessity of the lockdowns and the accompanying regulations – and I went, in a span of about 18 months, from welcoming them to despising them – they showed our political systems to be capable of things that few would have thought possible before, and few want to think possible now.

We should not overlook the good that came to light. People showed immense love in wanting to protect their vulnerable family members and friends. And yet, isolated in our homes while crowded together in online hothouses, there proved to be a fine line between acting responsibly and surrendering our judgment to the ecstasies of a common moral cause. What started with public displays of gratitude for healthcare workers swiftly progressed to neighbours reporting one another for breaking even the pettiest rules. The political upheavals in the summer of 2020 were clearly part of the same mass-emotional phenomenon, though the relationship is difficult to fully understand.

It is easy enough to dismiss the most dramatic events of the Covid years as anomalies, bred of exceptional times. But the pandemic also nurtured a more subtle, opposing shift. Office spaces and workstations are now familiar features of the middle class home, ranging from the garden cabin to the bundle of computer equipment crammed into the corner of the bedroom. These artefacts are just one indication of a transformation of private space that has taken place in recent years. It is not just working from home, which can bring obvious benefits. It is the discovery, driven home by the pandemic, that it is possible and actually rather comfortable to withdraw, tortoise-like, into a networked private sphere, where interactions with the outside world can be managed through software and home deliveries, and where the inconveniences of public life can be replaced by the manufactured experiences of digital technology.

If there is more turbulence in the years ahead, this reflex to abandon society for a cosseted domestic world may prove to be Covid’s most significant legacy.