Covid struck and Britain locked down. Here’s what we learned from that – and what we must do next time | Devi Sridhar

Three years on, amid rising lockdown scepticism, the public wants to move on from the trauma. But this is too important to forget

Three years to the day from when Britain went into formal lockdown, it’s worth reflecting on the historical moment we all lived through: a once-in-a-century kind of pandemic that swept the world over. As analysis and inquiries begin to make sense of what we lived through, it’s clear that different political factions are attempting to rewrite what happened and why. Some are questioning, driven in part by the Telegraph’s lockdown files, whether the Covid-19 pandemic was really that bad. Was the response by government proportionate?

In these debates, there’s a clear survival bias. Those who can ask these questions were affected by restrictions and are likely to have had Covid-19 once, if not several times, and survived. Those who died – an estimated 220,437 people in the UK – don’t have a chance to weigh in on whether government intervention was sufficient, or whether their deaths were preventable. More than a million people suffering from long Covid still face scepticism over their condition and an uphill battle to have it recognised and addressed.

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