Why was the five year anniversary of the pandemic so low key? - Jayne Dowle

Perhaps part of the problem is uncertainty over the actual date. Did Covid-19 start with the cases in China in the autumn of 2019, the World Health Organisation’s declaration of a pandemic on March 11, 2020 or when Prime Minister Boris Johnson told people on March 23 that they should stay home, save lives and protect the NHS?

Still, the official ‘Day of Reflection’ was Sunday, March 9. As the warmest UK day of the year so far, the weather played out its own mark of respect. Who remembers those balmy days of the first lockdown?

I understand there were various ceremonies, including a procession along the national Covid memorial wall by the River Thames and services at St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, all in London, and the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, where former Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen, who was taken to hospital with Covid and put into an induced coma in intensive care for 48 days, read out a new poem, starting with the words, ‘Coughing and coughing, gasping for air/Empty streets, no cars anywhere’.

I was expecting at the very least a televised Royal address, thinking of the late Queen speaking to the nation, and her tear-jerking promise that we would ‘all meet again’. Or even the Prime Minister, taking 10 minutes out of his hectic international schedule to check in and speak up. But radio silence, just a Sir Keir Starmer statement to the press: “Today, we come together to remember, reflect and pay tribute to the sacrifices made by people across our country.”

A quick Google search shows there was also an event at the monument here in Barnsley town centre, commissioned from renowned local sculptor Graham Ibbeson, which features eight figures, including a nurse and a volunteer carrying a bag of shopping.

It was led by Yorkshire Post columnist Ian McMillan, who contributed his words to the sculpture – both he and Ibbeson worked on it for free - and attended by council leaders and local schoolchildren.

But unless you knew about it in advance, you wouldn’t have known it had even happened.

Starmer also mentioned “the deep grief and loss that may never be relieved”. For many families, this devastation might be the reason why they simply don’t wish to participate in public activities. My children feel this way; in March 2021, their father was one of 227,000 people to die in the UK with Covid-19 listed as a cause of death. For them, the day of his passing is more poignantly marked in private rather than any kind of participatory occasion.

Yet, I sense a questioning dichotomy between such solitary remembrance and the demands made on the public to ‘pull together’ yet stay apart when Johnson announced lockdown after lockdown.

How odd it is to assume a kind of collective amnesia about those earth-shattering times; we couldn’t travel, our children didn’t go to school, millions of people worked from home, the skies fell mostly silent of aeroplanes, and so many words were written attempting to come to terms with this incalculable shift in human consciousness.

And now, an uneasy silence. Instead of a pride that we came through all the privations, there is almost a sense of shame that we suffered from so much loss of liberty for so long. Some people feel foolish for following orders to the letter, others are bitter and angry, because of all that they have lost, including businesses and livelihoods that never recovered from shutting down.

Despite all of Johnson’s proclamations that he would follow his hero Sir Winston Churchill’s ‘finest hour’, the politicians of the time failed. Whilst appearing to lead from the front, they partied behind the scenes, and as the ongoing Covid inquiry has revealed, treated the people they were supposed to serve and protect - us – with ill-disguised contempt.

Later this week, it’s reported that the inquiry will reconvene and hear evidence from former Conservative ministers Michael Gove, Steve Barclay and Helen Whately on how the government went about procuring PPE, ventilators and oxygen in the first stages of the pandemic.

This will perhaps be the starkest reminder of what we endured. And sadly, at the five-year mark, this disconnect between ‘us’ and ‘them’ stands as a truer legacy than any monument.