How Covid changed the way Britain thinks

In the strange, scary days of early 2020, with the world suddenly upended by the outbreak of a terrifying new virus, there were times when it seemed certain every aspect of society would be hugely altered by the experience.

Five years on, the physical impact has been profound. More than 220,000 people have died in the UK, out of 7 million worldwide. Many more have been left with a devastating post-viral illness.

But how did it change the way we think? Did it alter how we see ourselves, and our relationships with others and the rest of the world?

Amid the fear, social isolation and politicisation of the pandemic, conspiracy theories were born and polarisation appeared to grow. Yet experts trying to piece together the lasting impact that Covid has had on our social norms believe it may have merely accelerated worrying but existing trends of distrust and disillusionment, while some of the potentially unifying forces that the virus spawned have proved more fleeting.

While the evidence for how Covid has shaped social attitudes requires careful interpretation, research data can offer some insights.

Take the question of trust in politics. Comparing attitudes of political confidence in the five-year period from 2019 to 2024 – before the pandemic and after it – the British Social Attitudes survey published last year found levels of trust in government in the UK were as low as they had ever been. A record 45% told the survey they would “almost never” trust a government of any party to place the country above their party.

And 58% would “almost never” trust any politician to tell the truth when they are in a tight corner. More than two-thirds – 69% – agreed or agreed strongly with the assertion: “I don’t think the government cares much what people like me think.” In 2014 that figure was 53%.

People who have less trust in their government are more open to considering different ways of doing things, as perhaps has been reflected in some of the political turbulence of recent years. Nearly 80% believed the present way of governing Britain could be improved “quite a lot” or “a great deal”, the BSA found. A record 53% supported changing the electoral system to be more representative of minority parties.

Longer term, there is evidence of a decrease in confidence in democracy itself. Asked in 2023 how well they thought democracy worked in Britain, 33% said poorly and 43% said well; 10 years earlier, just 15% said poorly and 57% thought it worked well.

But Covid was not the only shock of a tumultuous period in the UK that also witnessed a tortuous Brexit, a cost of living crisis and two prime ministers being ousted from office. Nor did the pandemic invent social atomisation, scepticism of authority or division. Covid is certainly not the only factor shaping attitudes in recent years, say experts – some believe it may not even be the most significant.

“At the time I felt the pandemic was absolutely one of those disruptions that was going to shape our future,” says Bobby Duffy, aprofessor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London. “But looking at it now, [what we see] is that it has reinforced and accelerated existing trends that we’ve been seeing for a long, long time.”

There has long been evidence, for example, for disillusionment and increased social atomisation, Duffy says. On the question of whether older generations believe their children will have a better life than they did, the financial crisis of 2008-09 was potentially a more significant event than Covid, he says, with research showing this was a point when optimism in the future dramatically slumped.

Jennie Bristow, a reader in sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University who has written widely about the impact of the pandemic on young people, agrees that it “brought to a head many of the trends that were already happening. Covid didn’t create adolescent mental ill health, for instance. It didn’t suddenly bring about major mistrust in institutions.”

But unlike Duffy, her view is that the pandemic had an unprecedented impact on our thinking, not least because of the hugely restrictive responses it provoked. Bristow argues that while lockdowns were imposed with the aim of saving lives, one net effect was to formalise and embed social isolation – with all its negative consequences.

This has led to distrust of other people, particularly young people, as “germs on legs”, she says. The intense focus on obeying the rules also bred a more general mutual suspicion, she argues. “Everyone had their own version of the rules they were following, and they were [criticising] people who they thought were breaking them if they were doing something different. So there was that distrust of each other in society.”

That deepening distrust arguably had other consequences. From the earliest days of the pandemic, conspiracy theories spread among a small but committed minority, warning of the purported danger of 5G phone masts and claiming a future vaccine would involve microchips being implant in people at the behest of Bill Gates.

Though easily debunked, these conspirac theories have endured, mutated and spawned others. Conspiratorial thoughts around vaccines have proved remarkably enduring: in January 2021, as the vaccine rollout began in Britain, 75% of UK adults told YouGov it was definitely or probably false that vaccines had harmful effects that were not being disclosed. In August 2024 that figure had fallen to 56%, and those who thought it was definitely or probably true had soared from 14% to 34%.

By June 2023, almost a quarter of UK adults told a separate study they believed Covid was a hoax. In 2021, the percentage of children in England who were fully vaccinated by their fifth birthday fell below the WHO target of 95% for the first time, NHS figures show; it now stands at 92.6% – though this too has been a longer term trend, according to child health experts.

“I don’t think this is necessarily a unique phenomenon,” says Karen Douglas, a professor of social psychology at the university of Kent, whose work focuses on the appeal and consequences of conspiracy theories. “We know that during any time of crisis whenever there is social unrest, people are worried and scared, and we tend to see conspiracy theories. It’s a perfectly natural reaction.”

People felt unsafe and were being drip-fed information, obliged to comply with unprecedented state controls and isolated from their normal social networks – it was, she says, a “perfect storm” to foster conspiracy theories. “Most people aren’t talking much about the Covid 19 crisis any more, but I think that at least for some people these doubts and feelings of mistrust that are associated with conspiracy theories have remained.”

Did anything positive emerge from the pandemic? Some evidence, as it was ongoing, certainly suggested so: three times as many people told an ICM survey in late 2020 that the disease had brought society together (41%) as those who felt it was more divided (13%).

Even then, though, the sense of unity was slipping. In May 2020, 60% of people said that overall, the public’s response to Covid showed it was united; seven months later that number was down to 50%. Despite anecdotal and polling evidence during the lockdowns of new local connections being forged, more recent data suggests we may have reverted to where we started. In 2023-24, 61% said they felt strongly or very strongly connected to their local neighbourhood, according to government statistics; that is about the same as 2021-22 (63%), and every other year back to 2015 (60-63%).

“There definitely was a sense of coming together,” says Duffy. “There was a sense of: could this be a revival period for civil society? But it’s not dissimilar to lots of the other infrastructures we put in around Covid [that have since been dismantled]. As soon as a crisis is gone, we do slip back to the usual way of working … I suspect it was always a bit of wishful thinking.”

More time will need to pass before the legacy of Covid can be accurately assessed. But, suggests Duffy, history may come to judge its impact – relative to pre-existing trends in society – as having been less consequential than it seemed at the time.

“Covid definitely will be seen as part of the [forces] defining now and into the future, but only a part,” he says. “Not to the extent that you would think a global pandemic that upended our life for two years would.”