Covid killed my father and, five years on, it's still blighting Britain

By March 8, the whole thing had become a bit more serious, but not so much as to call off Scotland’s showdown with France at Murrayfield, the only sign that life was changing was those who remembered there might be a problem recoiling at the proffer of a handshake. Elbow bumps only, please.

What we didn’t know was the Covid seed had already been sown at a Nike conference in the Hilton Carlton hotel just over a week earlier. Nor did we know that the authorities already knew. A fortnight later, on March 23, the first lockdown came into force, with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announcing there had been 499 positive cases in Scotland, and four more deaths to bring the total to 14.

Myth of Scotland’s handling of pandemic

Just over two weeks after that, I took a call from a consultant in Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital who told me my physically robust dad had become one of those cases, and six days later he was a fatality statistic, one of those who had been moved from hospital into a care home where he probably picked up the virus.

A year later, the Covid death toll in Scottish care homes was estimated to be around 3,400, out of a Scottish total of 10,000, and while figures vary, by the end of 2022, Covid had killed some 16,500 Scots out of a UK total of around 202,000.

The Office for National Statistics analysed the number of excess deaths between the start of 2020 and June 2022 and found that the death rate in England was 3.2 per cent above pre-Covid levels. Scotland was only marginally better at three per cent, yet the myth of how better Scotland handled the pandemic persists, and I’ve heard it twice in recent weeks, on both occasions referring back to a comparison between Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson, and a somewhat reluctant acceptance that, given the similar death toll, it was a triumph of style over substance.

Sweden responded differently

That mistakes were made is beyond question, understandable to an extent because a deadly pandemic caused by an unknown bug like Covid had not happened in anyone’s lifetime, but it still came down to choices and places like Sweden, Norway and Finland chose not to impose such a rigid lockdown and had better outcomes.

In Sweden, schools and cafes remained open and there was no travel ban, and an early spike in deaths was attributed to people becoming infected on foreign skiing trips during their half-term winter holiday, but by the end of 2020 there were fewer deaths being recorded than normal expectations.

It was the same in Finland and Norway, and by the time the second and third lockdowns were imposed this was known, but their example was not followed. The result is that no harm was done to Swedish children’s education, hospital waiting lists did not lengthen and the economy suffered comparatively little long-term damage.

Here, the supposedly well-handled emergency kept children out of schools for longer than even England and Wales. The shambles of trying to give school pupils accurate grades for their coursework instead of exams seems to have faded from memory, but the effect of lowering benchmarks is still being felt.

Soviet-style nostalgia for Sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon’s emotional evidence at the Covid Inquiry this time last year pulled back the curtain on what had been going on, but the reaction to her response split opinions between opponents who condemned her crocodile tears and supporters who insisted she displayed genuine human feelings for those who had suffered loss.

Perhaps it’s just me but now she’s in the clear from the Operation Branchform investigation into missing SNP funds, her now frequent appearance at literary events is generating a sort of Sturgeon nostalgia, like Russians who still venerate Stalin, a wish for the return of strong leadership, even though her track record is one of underachievement on almost all counts, except creating division and saddling her successors with a welfare budget the country cannot afford. Despite the Scottish Government now spending around £470 million on the Scottish Child Payment, nearly a quarter of children still live in relative poverty.

The symptoms of national Long Covid are still there and this is largely responsible for the actions in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement, or rather emergency budget, on Wednesday. A two per cent rise in economic inactivity since the pandemic, in Scotland to some 22 per cent of the labour force or 750,000 potential workers, is not all down to early retirement, with an increase in sickness claims.

Soaring national debt

Rachel Reeves’s £4.8 billion cut in the annual welfare bill is the result. And if you believe the public sector unions, then the loss of 10,000 civil service jobs is a catastrophe, but it will only bring the headcount back to where it was before the pandemic.

No one can genuinely claim that public services are better now with the contribution of those 10,000 bureaucrats, when the evidence strongly indicates the opposite, certainly from the point of view of taxpayers who must fund them.

The impact the pandemic has had on our lives cannot be overestimated, and hopefully we’ll never have deserted streets, empty schools and spectator-less sports again, but online meetings, working from home and all the other by-products, like streets narrowed for bicycle lanes, are here to stay. Along with a soaring national debt.