We read your article with great interest and can identify with the issues it raised (How Covid changed children in Britain, 18 March). However, it isn’t just children who have been affected by the Covid lockdowns. All age groups have been mentally changed.
Our 15-year-old daughter died of leukaemia in September 2020, and we had to cremate her with a select “guest list” due to Covid restrictions – most of her friends were excluded; the strict limit on numbers meant only family members could attend the “event”.
A few short days after her funeral, a lockdown was imposed and my wife and I had to sit in our terrace house (no leafy garden and countryside for us to walk in, only an urban desert of brick and asphalt) for nearly five months. We were shorn of the comfort of our family, all of whom lived miles away and were cruelly not allowed to visit. That did us no mental favours at all and has scarred us deeply. Do we trust politicians or senior NHS people? No.
Covid and the restrictions that were imposed affected us all, and not for the good. Is it any wonder that our nation is mentally ill?
Wayne and Helen Osborne
Beeston, Nottinghamshire
Frances Ryan’s excellent article raises a number of important questions, not least in relation to the ongoing political silence around Covid (Long Covid is the pandemic’s dark shadow. Why does no one in power in Britain want to talk about it?, 17 March). That silence continues around deaths. In England and Wales, the most recent data from the Office for National Statistics shows that between 3 January and 28 February, there were 884 deaths involving Covid and 601 where Covid was the underlying cause of death. The silence around who is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the past five years remains deafening.
Many of these deaths resulted from cynical political choices and morally indefensible, expedient decision-making by politicians. Their choices resulted in a catastrophic number of preventable deaths, even if they are not definitively quantifiable. Politicians have followed a strategy designed to silence discussion and deflect attention about who was, and is, responsible. Those in government at the time, and their advisers, need to be held to account for what amounts to foreseeable, avoidable, deaths – in other words, social murder on an outrageous scale.
Joe Sim
Emeritus professor, Liverpool John Moores University
Steve Tombs
Emeritus professor, The Open University
Thank you for remembering the significant numbers still living with long Covid, five years on (Editorial, 14 March). TS Eliot’s words capture their situation so well: “And meanwhile we have gone on living / Living and partly living”.
I used to lecture on rehabilitation sciences. Rehabilitation takes skill, time and a deep understanding of the circumstances and hopes of each person. Both the chancellor and prime minister have recently focused on the bill for welfare and the need to reform our “broken” welfare system. The system that was allowed to break was the reablement system. Rehabilitation services such as day hospitals or rehab wards were mortally wounded under the Tory health secretary Virginia Bottomley, and disintegrated under her successor Andrew Lansley. If a new service arises that helps people who feel broken and worthless rebuild their lives, the whole country will be the stronger (and probably less broke).
Prof Woody Caan
Duxford, Cambridgeshire
Covid did indeed change TV (‘We warned everyone: do not go near Tom Cruise!’ How Covid sent British TV haywire, five years on, 17 March), particularly in stimulating creative new formats, such as Staged, or adaptations such as Talking Heads. But beyond that, their style and innovation helped and reassured us as we stumbled into a new world of lockdown relationships lived through dodgy Zoom connections and fuzzy old screens.
I’d particularly honour Grayson’s Art Club and Sky’s Portrait Artist of the Week. Those two clever rapid responses to audience isolation became landmarks of warmth, interest and humanity in the weeks of such limited human contact. They meant so much at the time.
John Forsyth
Penzance, Cornwall
