Modern Britain is full of anniversaries (many say it is too full). Few anniversaries are as grim as the fifth anniversary of the first Covid lockdown, memorably announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on live TV on March 23^rd 2020, five years ago this week.

This anniversary is not a time for warm nostalgia, but traumatic flashbacks. Johnson’s announcement coincided, almost precisely, with the Spring equinox. I can remember musing that the lockdown may be over by Easter, then only three weeks away. How wrong we all were. April was indeed the cruellest month.

Covid was a disaster in public health terms, and a social and economic catastrophe, with very few silver linings. Politically, the pandemic may have had some therapeutic value, reminding people of the importance of the state, and the  generous public spending to pay for treatment of the infected, fund the hunt for a vaccine, and pay for the furlough and business support schemes that compensated millions of people who lost some or all of their livelihoods. But this is outweighed by the economic havoc, the long-term damage to physical and mental health, as well as the temporary misery of not being able to go out, or to meet friends and family. The pandemic did not even bequeath a positive cultural legacy. The double act of David Tennant and Michael Sheen in Staged, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s kitchen disco, and live streaming of performances from shuttered theatres and concert halls, were all profoundly unfunny, uninspiring and depressing. Almost all the other communal activities set up to cheer us up – online fancy dress parties, socially distanced picnics, virtual pub quizzes – left most people, me included, feeling thoroughly miserable.

Covid was full of contradictions. For once it was a Conservative government that threw fiscal caution to the wind and spent whatever was needed (can you imagine the outcry about the ever-expanding state had a Labour government done so?). Just as the world’s media picked up on the epidemic of modern loneliness, and the vital importance of social contact for good mental health, we were instructed to stay at home, indefinitely: no exceptions. Just as the  media started warning us of the harm done by single-use plastics, they were suddenly everywhere: plastic stickers telling us to socially distance, masks, gloves, and later on all the paraphernalia of Covid tests and vaccines. All of them carried strict warnings that they were not recyclable, and had to be thrown away for landfill or incineration after a single use.

The nanny state went into overdrive, and even five years later A4 posters in toilets, telling adults how to wash our hands with soap, are still a common sight. In Greenwich (the London borough where I’d lived until 2014, and served as a councillor), donations of rainbow posters from children to brighten the walls of the local hospital were turned away, lest the paper they were drawn on might convey the virus. Then there was the over-officious way in which lockdowns were policed. There was always a public health reason for stopping, or curtailing, any form of outdoor activity imaginable: even games of golf, trips to deserted beaches, or country walks (most notoriously of all, Derbyshire police sent out drones to catch people going for walks in the Peak District).

The pandemic led to a new genre of toe-curling public information films, set in an imaginary universe whose residents behaved like no human beings I have ever met. The most ridiculous was the one where a man summons a mate to join an outdoor gathering in a park, only to be told “Too many”. The “rule of six” was of course widely flouted, or even blatantly ignored, by almost everybody. The reason that “Partygate” created such rage was not simply that rules were being infringed in Ten Downing Street – the same rules were probably being infringed in just about every other workplace and home in Britain – but simply that there were being infringed by such a large degree. Many people felt some sympathy for civil servants having a drink or two. The real reason for the outrage was not the Covid rule-breaking , but the infringement of pre-existing codes of behaviour (such as the rude treatment of Downing Street’s cleaning staff), the egregious use of a suitcase to bring in booze from a nearby off-license, and the subsequent cover-up. It is often forgotten that the final nail in the coffin of Johnson’s premiership was not Partygate, but the outcry in the Conservative benches in the Commons about his lack of action on groping allegations faced by the chief whip, the appropriately named Chris Pincher.

It is often argued that Partygate meant that never again will a strict lockdown ever command public consent, and that a partial lockdown to protect the elderly and vulnerable is the most that the public would put up with. But that was true anyway, well before anyone raised a glass in Number Ten on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, and well before Matt Hancock’s clinch in his departmental office. I am no fan of Johnson, or of Hancock, but they became convenient scapegoats. The real reason why lockdowns will never work in future is not because we hate hypocritical politicians, but because we’re human.

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Compared to many people, I had little to complain about during the Covid lockdowns of 2020-21. It is not selfish for me to point out that the Covid lockdowns went too far. Far from it: I do so not out of self-pity but out of empathy with millions of people who were less fortunate than I was (and am). My work as a freelance writer was largely home-based anyway. Interviews with ghostwriting clients often carried on, but done virtually rather than in-person. In my field of work. like many others, Covid simply accelerated technological trends that had already begun. Some projects were cancelled, others postponed, but I was adequately compensated through the self-employed business support scheme that Rishi Sunak set up. At the time I lived in a spacious, detached house in a secluded Northamptonshire village, with a sizeable garden, plenty of space for my partner and me to work from home, and direct access to beautiful countryside.

The trouble was that far too many journalists and politicians had similar blessings, living like me in houses in the suburbs or the countryside, with gardens. For them, like me, Covid lockdowns were a burden, but not a curse. For those who lost their jobs, or who kept their jobs but lived in cramped flats, and were forced to study or work from home without a private room of their own or even desk space, Covid was abject misery. I heard many stories about young people in flatshares who had nowhere to work other than to set up their laptops in bed. Their misery was largely forgotten. So was the impact on school-age children. My daughter had just turned 14 when the first lockdown began. Like millions of others, Covid meant that many of the activities that are taken for granted – forming friendship groups, interacting with the opposite sex, teenage parties where supervised experiments with alcohol are conducted – were cancelled, or postponed for a year or two.

At the time, the chief scientific advisor Sir Patrick Vallance was unfairly vilified for suggesting that a degree of herd immunity would help tackle the virus (he later apologised for making the claim). But at the time it was not yet that clear that, unlike many viruses, Covid couldn’t be combatted by herd immunity, and that those who had caught the virus once were just as likely to suffer adverse effects if affected a second time. However, it soon was clear that a very high proportion of those who became seriously ill, and an even higher proportion of those that died, had pre-existing health conditions. Of the oldest who died, up to 88% had a pre-existing health condition, and while Covid may have been put on their death certificate, a high proportion died with Covid, not of Covid. Confirmation bias, sampling bias, the media’s insatiable hunt for striking stories, meant that it was often forgotten that 92% of fatalities were people aged over 60, and almost 60% were aged 80 and above, not the young and fit people whose faces haunted the front pages.

Pointing this out can be mistaken for callousness towards younger fatalities, and their loved ones. I know a few  younger people who still suffer from “long Covid”, and  I have older relatives and friends who died of the virus (though in all cases they had serious underlying health problems). When I argue that lockdowns were too strict, and went on too long, I am not being indifferent to the mortality of those who did not recover from the virus, the misery felt by the bereaved, or the ongoing suffering of those with long Covid. I am merely taking a long, objective look at a myriad of statistics.

One of the great tragedies of the pandemic was how the anti-lockdown arguments were soon monopolised by the libertarian right. Criminalising people who went on country walks should have been opposed by the left as well as the right. But the scepticism came primarily from Toby Young’s Lockdown Sceptics blog, which began by asking sensible questions about the necessity, and extent, of lockdowns. In its new guise. as the Daily Sceptic. it soon  descended into conspiracy theories about the very vaccines that allowed lockdowns to be permanently lifted, and stoking culture wars about climate change, immigration and sexuality. If only the British left had a Toby Young of its own, to scrutinise lockdowns not just through the prism of personal liberty, but to examine their devastating effects on jobs, livelihoods, education and mental health – particularly among the young.

The libertarian right’s opposition to Covid lockdowns was always full of contradictions, of course. People who railed against the restrictions on personal liberty were often the same people who then peddled ridiculous conspiracy theories about the very Covid vaccines that allowed those restrictions to be removed. Depressingly, too many on the left instinctively argued that lockdowns were too short, or too lenient. This created a vacuum that was filled by loons and conspiracy theorists, many of them on the far right. With hindsight there should have been much less restrictive lockdowns on the young and able-bodied, in the interest of education, the economy and collective sanity. But only a brave politician would have articulated such a case as the death toll mounted into the tens of thousands, and then into the hundreds of thousands.

Another reason why this anniversary leaves me cold is that so much commentary misses the point. The most important thing is not to wallow in memories of how terrible Covid lockdowns were, or even to recall the death toll and the misery of the virus itself, but to plan for the next pandemic. Five years on, we are still grappling with the fiscal impact of an extra £313 billion in public sector borrowing. The UK’s debt stock is now verging on 100% of GDP. Could Britain have avoided such an economic millstone, without the death rate sky-rocketing? How can democracies strike a better balance between preventing virus spread to reduce mortality, and keeping economies and education systems functioning? No-one can really claim with a  straight face that the right balance was struck in 2020-21.

In fact, there is an example of how we could have handled Covid much better only a few hundreds miles away. Sweden’s Covid mortality rate was lower than the UK’s, even though it avoided strict lockdowns and instead relied on voluntary guidance. Few bars, restaurants, workplaces or schools were ever shut down. Sweden’s experience was not perfect, of course. But I do wish the UK’s Covid enquiry would look at more international comparisons, and ask how a country like Sweden ended up with death rates no higher than Britain, without compulsory lockdowns and with much less economic harm. While Sweden saw a Covid recession in 2020-21, like all European countries, it was shorter and less deep than most.

I know Sweden very well, having spent the best part of a year there in 2017-18, and I have written about its many cultural differences from Britain. However, these differences are outweighed by the similarities. Both countries are liberal, constitutional monarchies in northern Europe. Both are historically protestant, but increasingly diverse and with high levels of immigration in recent decades. Both have advanced economies, and place a high premium on personal freedom. But when I mention Sweden’s Covid response, and what lessons the UK can learn from it, people often point out that far from being very similar, Sweden and Britain are very different.  They miss the point: the fact that Sweden is geographically much larger, with a population less than a sixth of the UK’s (simply because it has much larger swathes of wilderness  where hardly anyone lives) is neither here nor there. The key metric is that 88% of Swedes live in towns and cities (very similar to the 84% of Britons who do). In both countries, most people live – and most Covid cases occurred – in densely populated urban areas.

Instead of looking at what lessons we can learn from Sweden, and elsewhere, the British media is marking the fifth anniversary of Covid with hundreds of parochial, navel-gazing pieces with headlines like “Five years on, what did Covid mean for British education/ cultural industries/ public finances/ tourism/ indoor bowls?” (delete as applicable). One of the more sensible academic voices on Covid, the UCL professor Christina Pagel, has fallen into the trap of arguing that the wrong lessons have been learned from the pandemic, and that the necessity of lockdowns is being forgotten. This is the opposite of the truth: in fact there is not nearly enough reasonable debate about the duration, severity and success of Covid lockdowns.

The real scandal is not the UK’s Covid death rate (which was certainly not the highest in Europe, and was in fact lower than many other European countries), or even the slapdash precautions put in place in care homes to protect Covid patients from infecting others. The real scandal, which has yet to fully emerge, is the exploitation of the contracting process for PPE procurement, and the “fast lane” exploited by many cronies of Conservative MPs and peers, such as Michelle Mone (whose company, PPE Medpro, is still under police investigation).

In 2020-21 schools were closed for far too long, inflicting permanent damage on children’s education and wellbeing. Shambolically, in some cases they reopened, only to close again later the same day. Outdoor movement and social interaction was restricted far too much. Adults were infantilised, most ludicrously through a 10pm pub curfew. The pandemic caused the long-term shutdown of businesses, meeting spaces and schools: sacrifices which probably had very little impact on the death toll, and may have had no impact at all. The evidence to support the theory that a lockdown starting earlier than late March 2020, or going on longer, would have resulted in fewer deaths is very patchy.  The ongoing Covid inquiry’s preoccupations with the health aspects of the pandemic is understandable. But it is paying too little attention to the trade-offs that really matter: how to keep an economy going, how to educate children and young people, and how to prevent an epidemic of mental health problems while a nasty bug is going around. The next time there is a serious pandemic – and I hope and pray there will never be one like Covid – politicians must have the courage to confront these hard choices.