How Covid destroyed our lives, from newborns to pensioners

Jostled by others on a packed commuter train, or crowding into a noisy pub, it's easy to forget that recent inflection point when the world pressed pause on normal life. It is scarcely four and a half years since the UK Government, along with others globally, imposed the first national lockdown to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. But, in some ways, the trauma of that time was swiftly forgotten. We moved on with relief, and shudder today at those distant, bewildering memories of social distancing.

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests we haven't truly turned the page on what now sounds more like a chapter from dystopian fiction. Instead, the effects of the Covid lockdowns endure , and will continue to be observed and charted for many decades to come. "We'll probably be studying the impact of this for as long as we live," says Adam Hampshire, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at King's College London (KCL).

A startling reminder of the long-term fallout of those unprecedented restrictions came just this week, as new figures revealed that the number of people on sickness benefits rose to 3.9m, an increase of almost 40 per cent since the pandemic first hit.

That came hard on the heels of news this month that lockdowns may have caused premature ageing to teenagers' brains. Research from the University of Washington found the measures resulted in " unusually accelerated brain maturation " in adolescents, and that this was far more pronounced in girls than boys. While the average acceleration in the development of the male adolescent brain was 1.4 years, for females it was 4.2 years.

If girls were more dramatically affected, this could be due to their heavier reliance on social relationships, the researchers have suggested.

But this cohort is not the only one subject to the long-lasting impacts of lockdown. Across every age group, a wide range of effects has already been mapped. Experts believe that more will emerge in time.

Indeed, it turns out that the way we managed Covid has dramatically affected every generation. Here's how.

Young children

The first 1,001 days of a child's life are deemed critical for their cognitive, emotional and physical development. When a cohort of children was born into the abnormal state of affairs seen in 2020 and 2021, a massive social experiment was inadvertently launched. The long-term effects on these so-called lockdown babies have been playing out ever since. Research suggests that many of these infants are developmentally behind where they should be. In 2022, an Irish survey found babies born in lockdown were slower than usual to reach milestones such as talking, pointing and waving goodbye. By the age of one, only 77 per cent of pandemic babies could say one meaningful word, compared to 89 per cent born before Covid. While almost all (93 per cent) of those born pre-pandemic could point, only 84 per cent of lockdown babies could do so by 12 months.

Study author Dr Susan Byrne of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland attributed these lags to lack of social contact during the Irish lockdown (which was even stricter than the British one).

Last year, the Irish researchers further reported that by age two, although they were now at the expected level in other areas of behaviour and development, pandemic babies' communication skills still lagged behind those born pre-Covid. "Tiny social circles" were cited by the researchers.

For primary school pupils, many of whom were reliant on overworked, underqualified parents to teach them the curriculum at home, academic attainment was found last year to remain markedly lower than pre-pandemic levels. Sats results showed the proportion of Year 6 pupils meeting expected standards of reading, writing and maths was only 59 per cent in both 2023 and 2022 – down from 65 per cent in 2019.

For Dan Paskins, interim executive director at Save the Children, such longer-term effects are hardly surprising. "There's been a really big impact on the expected levels of children's social and emotional development in their first few years," he says. "There's been some really rapid regression."

The lockdown babies are now starting school, and the impact of their extraordinary early days is stark. "There's a school in Birmingham where more than half the children entering [Reception] were still wearing nappies," says Paskins. "Before the pandemic there might have been one or two. Now more than half have that developmental delay, and what that means in terms of how children are able to learn and function."

Across the country, teachers now say almost a quarter of children in their Reception class are not toilet trained, according to a survey by the Kindred Squared charity published in February. Pupils are losing, on average, a third of their learning time each day as teachers are spending time supporting children who are not school-ready, the research highlighted.

Although decline in school readiness has been a growing trend since well before the pandemic, lockdown is thought to have exacerbated it. "The year group coming into Reception now are the lockdown babies and you can really see it in the extent of the social need, difficulties with behaviour , [struggles] with separation, sharing and language development," says Liz Robinson, chief executive of Big Education, a multi-academy trust. "If a child is in nappies and needs to be changed, it drains the resources. It means those staff [changing nappies] are not in the classroom interacting with the other children."

Molly Devlin, early years network lead for the Ark Schools group, where she supports Reception classes, says she has seen "more [children] than ever before" starting school in nappies this year and last . This reflects the disruption to children's services during lockdown, she says. "There was a complete stop to services like health visitors and two-year [developmental] checks were happening over the phone and therefore were totally dependent on parent self-reporting."

Parents experienced "significant isolation", as Devlin points out. Those who didn't know what milestones their infants should be meeting were cut off from the professionals and peers who could have informed them, and from the help they might otherwise have received.

While not all children were adversely affected (some benefited from their parents being at home more) a question mark hangs over whether those who suffered the worst effects will ever catch up. "It wasn't like it was a rubbish time but that's all over," says Paskins. "That impact is continuing."

Without intensive support, things are likely to get worse for these children over time, not better, he warns. "You're less likely to learn and get good exam results and a good job. We're going to be seeing the impact of this for decades to come."

Holed up in their bedrooms for hours each day, with just social media for company, teenagers missed crucial face-to-face interaction with peers at a formative, and quite often turbulent, life stage. The impact of lockdowns on their mental health has been well-documented. Disruption to their education and prolonged social isolation "exposed young people to many known risk factors for mental illness, raising serious concerns about their wellbeing," researchers at KCL wrote in 2022.

One of the university's studies, published in May 2021, found nearly half of 11 to 12-year-olds in this cohort reported an increase in symptoms of depression, while a quarter reported an increase in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. A systematic review led by KCL's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience found lockdown was associated with psychological distress, loneliness, boredom, fear and stress among young people. Again, girls were found to have been hardest hit.

So have these effects endured, or have teenagers bounced back? Research by University College London and the Sutton Trust, published last November, found a third of 17 and 18-year-olds reported the legacy of Covid was still harming their education and mental health. The study of more than 11,000 pupils found 44 per cent of Year 13 students could be classed as experiencing high psychological distress between November 2022 and April 2023 (when normal life had resumed), compared to 35 per cent in 2017.

School absences have also risen sharply since the pandemic, with one in five (19.4 per cent) pupils classed as being "persistently absent" last autumn, meaning they missed over 10 per cent of school days. This was up from 10.9 per cent before the pandemic. Recent research has suggested parents can be complicit in this. For example, unauthorised absence rates are 20 per cent higher on Fridays, and Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children's Commissioner, has pointed out that, "Parents are at home on Fridays... We've had evidence from kids [who say], 'Well, Mum and Dad are at home, stay at home'."

Then there are the downstream effects of the cancellation of exams. Instead of sitting their GCSEs and A-levels in 2020 and 2021, pupils were awarded grades based on teacher assessments. Under this improvised temporary system, a record number of pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland secured top A-level grades. If this sounds like a win for the students concerned, some paid the price later, Paskins notes. "What it meant is there were young people who had better grades [than they might have done otherwise] and went on to college or university, then couldn't do the work and so dropped out," he says. "That can impact mental health [too]."

While neither grade inflation nor poor mental health explains every case, it's notable that more than 18,000 students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland had dropped out of university courses by February 2022, an increase of more than 4,000 compared with the same point in 2021, and 3,000 more than the figures for February 2019, according to experimental Student Loans Company data.

The main reason students cite for leaving university early, according to separate analysis last year from KCL and the Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education is down to one key factor: mental health.

Young adults

As with children, the physical risks to healthy young adults posed by Covid itself were far smaller than for older generations. But the impact on them of measures taken to protect the more vulnerable sections of society was serious.

Undergraduates missed out on the rite of passage that the cut and thrust of student life represents. Twenty-somethings entering the jobs market while working from home missed out on crucial opportunities to learn from more experienced colleagues. New mothers found themselves cut off from many support services and social opportunities.

This month, an alarming snapshot of Generation Z graduates emerged in a report by the NHS Confederation and Boston Consulting Group (BCG): tens of thousands are moving straight from university into long-term sickness, they found. In 2021-22, almost 63,400 people aged 16 to 24 followed this trajectory, up from less than 37,000 in 2019-20.

This subsection of young people has increased by 18 per cent since before the pandemic, making it the fastest-growing group of economically inactive adults, according to the report's author, Raoul Ruparel, director of BCG's Centre for Growth. The surge was attributed largely to an "acceleration" of mental health conditions post-Covid.

Earlier research by Prof Hampshire and others during the first Covid wave found young adults appeared to be particularly exposed to lockdown's suspension of normality. "In terms of disrupted lifestyle, that was being reported more by people in their 20s and 30s," he says.

While their drug use decreased significantly, as nights out became out of bounds, alcohol use increased. "We asked people why and a lot of it was boredom ," says Prof Hampshire.

Within this cohort existed a subset of young people who increased their illicit substance use "because they were having trouble sleeping, felt lonely and down, and those problems can persist longer term and [turn into] dependency," he adds. "Where they report they were using it as a prop, they tend to continue."

The long-term health effects of increased alcohol or drug use prompted by lockdown are yet to fully hit home. But the excess drinking alone could lead to thousands of extra deaths and hospital admissions over the next 20 years, research from NHS England and the University of Sheffield has indicated. Young adults aged 25 to 34 who were already heavier drinkers than their peers pre-pandemic were more likely to up their alcohol intake still further during lockdown than any other age group, the study found.

Worryingly, such behaviour is thought to have persisted, in this and other age groups. "Roll forward, and all the groups that were drinking more during the pandemic have continued drinking more since the pandemic, and in some cases it's increased," says Richard Piper, chief executive of Alcohol Change UK. "The reason is that alcohol is an addictive substance. It's hard to bring it down. So you will find a lot of those home drinkers have never returned to pre-pandemic levels and have often increased their drinking."

The middle-aged

Perhaps counterintuitively, this cohort was already drinking more than young adults before the pandemic. Less surprisingly, lockdowns did little to make them stop, in most cases.

These are the at-home drinkers, typically parents in their late 30s, 40s and 50s, more likely to open a bottle of wine in front of a box set than prop up a bar. During lockdown, about a quarter gave up (typically the lighter drinkers), and about three quarters started drinking significantly more , says Piper. "It wasn't just the fact [they were] at home for longer. There were lots of triggers. If you're triggered when you walk past your fridge, people were going, 'oh my God, I'm reaching for a glass of wine at 4pm when I wouldn't normally.'"

Added to this was the acute anxiety, stress and boredom of lockdown, which drove so many to self-medicate with alcohol. Among them were those who were furloughed or laid off, and found the boredom propelling them into a vicious cycle whereby "someone who's not working starts drinking then finds that drinking escalates, and then they're just not motivated to get into work, and they're more bored," says Piper. "Lots of people were bored in the pandemic and were drinking more."

The fatal consequences have started to make their way into the statistics. The number of alcohol-related deaths recorded in 2022 was 4.2 per cent higher than in 2021 (9,641 deaths) and 32.8 per cent higher than in 2019 (7,565 deaths), Office for National Statistics data from this year shows.

Mothers of school-age children meanwhile experienced their own particular stresses, from the switch to homeschooling . The resulting damage to maternal mental health was comparable to that caused by divorce, University of Essex research showed in 2022. Professor Birgitta Rabe, who led the study, cannot say to what extent these effects continued after schools reopened. But, she says, "One thing we do know from the mental health literature is that smaller stresses tend to accumulate. So if things happen to you over and over, it accumulates into a bigger problem."

A married 46-year-old mother from Buckinghamshire, whose two children were aged 12 and eight, and at separate schools, when the pandemic began, says: "Juggling teaching children and working during the pandemic was a complete nightmare. It was the guilt that neither of us could teach them, because we were both working full-time.

"One school did a really good job of online classes, but the other school did no teaching so we had to teach. All they did was issue homework lists – and it was really hard to find the time to do that.

"They weren't very focused, it was lots of topics like history and maths, and also science experiments which required lists of ingredients that we didn't have."

It was, perhaps, understandable that the middle-aged juggling work and homeschooling while trying to stave off imminent nervous breakdowns were sometimes apt to envy their Boomer parents. There were those in good health in their late 60s and 70s who arguably didn't have the worst time of it, with their routines less disrupted.

But this possibly masks the harmful and irreversible impact of lockdown on so many of pensionable age. Last year, a study led by the University of Exeter and KCL found cognitive function and working memory in older people declined rapidly during the first year of the pandemic, whether or not they actually contracted Covid. The pattern continued into 2021-22, with researchers citing the heightened loneliness and depression suffered during the lockdowns by this cohort, as well as a decrease in exercise and – again – increased drinking.

The fact that cognitive decline can lead to dementia underscores the importance of supporting this group, the researchers suggested.

"If you think of all the things you're supposed to do or avoid to mitigate age-related decline, such as [limiting] drinking, [doing] exercise, socialising – a lot of those changed for the worse," says Prof Hampshire, who co-authored the study. Those affected would be unlikely to recover from the cognitive decline suffered as a result, he suggests.

Having severely restricted their day-to-day activities and interactions, often irrevocably, the pandemic, and associated restrictions, robbed many at the older end of this age group of the final years of their life in which they could have expected to enjoy themselves in the company of family, friends and neighbours.

Bella Fowler, 68, from west London, says: "I was looking after my mother who had Alzheimers . She was on her own with me, obviously, she didn't have any other stimulation so that was hard. She was 92 when Covid struck and thank goodness she hadn't gone into a nursing home.

"In a way, it was good that we were able to have her, but in a way it was tough because we had her all the time.

"The other thing that was really bad about Covid and the lockdown was that we were threatened with the idea that if we passed it on to somebody, we'd almost be responsible for their death. It just made life so miserable."

She adds: "A lot of people have never really quite recovered. I would say it took me at least two years, and even now lots of my friendships are impacted."

Future fallout

So far what we have seen is a steady stream of studies hinting at just some of the damage done. There is also strong evidence that the absence of any preventative measures would have resulted in a far greater number of Covid deaths and in our hospitals becoming overwhelmed.

Undoubtedly there were trade-offs to be made, and the argument over whether the benefits of lockdown outweighed the harms will continue to rage.

But only in the coming years, it seems, will the full impact of our national shutdown be revealed: in the educational and career impacts on those who were young at the time: in the future alcohol deaths; perhaps in the proportion of pandemic pensioners who go on to suffer from dementia.

We almost certainly haven't yet seen the last of it. "There was a prolonged impact on people's lifestyles and mental health," says Prof Hampshire. "That is going to have downstream consequences."

Additional reporting by Natasha Leake and Ben Butcher