The Long Shadow of Covid-19

This weekend saw moving ceremonies to the Covid dead taking place at sites across the UK. But how should we remember a pandemic that is far from over and whose meaning is deeply contested?

“A shadow passed over us and hundreds of thousands of people felt the sudden and unexpected loss of loved ones.” – Michael Rosen.

It is tempting to think that pandemics must have a meaning. After all, like world wars, pandemics are world events. And as Covid-19 reminds us, their impacts can be just as far-reaching.

Five years on from the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic on March 11, 2020, governments are still struggling to adjust to the record levels of public borrowing and the fiscal stimulus packages that were a consequence of the pandemic lockdowns. Meanwhile, millions of families continue to grieve the loss of loved ones to a virus that we could and should have done a better job of controlling.

One of the thousands of red hearts that feature on the UK’s National Covid Memorial Wall.

But in other respects, it is remarkable how little things have changed. Although the lockdowns offered us a brief glimpse of a different way of being – one where we spent less time in offices and more time with our families and friends – the window closed as quickly as it opened. The result is that rather than the pandemic marking a historical watershed and an opportunity to rethink our world, in 2025 we are faced with the same inequalities, the same ideological divisions and the same intolerance as before.

Why this should be the case is something that puzzles commentators. The pandemic changed everything from work to education to how we think about death and end of life care. But as David Wallace-Wells noted in a recent essay in The New York Times: “We… hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us”.

In an article on “How Covid changed Britain”, The Observer made a similar observation. “Most people don’t want to dwell on the pandemic… but like a forgotten mask in an old coat pocket, the effects of the Covid pandemic are still with us.”

These sentiments echo almost word for word the observations of the American historian Alfred W. Crosby on the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Noting the curious absence of references to the pandemic in the writings of American novelists and politicians in the 1920s, Crosby, who titled his book America’s Forgotten Pandemic, wrote: “One searches for explanations for the odd fact that Americans took little notice of the pandemic, and then quickly forgot what they did notice.”

One reason that pandemics are so prone to cultural amnesia is that they do not lend themselves to clear moral narratives. After all, who can be held accountable for the random mutations of a virus? This is especially true when, as in the case of Covid-19, the origins of the pandemic are deeply contested, and no one can agree if it would have made any difference had we locked down sooner.

Another reason is that, unlike wars, which are endlessly mediated in our culture, pandemics lack familiar mnemonic prompts. There is no viral equivalent of the Last Post or the hollow square at The Cenotaph. And without recurring symbols and rituals, pandemics struggle to embed themselves in public memory.

That is why the ceremonies that took place across Britain on Sunday are so significant. In a public consultation exercise launched by the previous Conservative government, the UK Commission on Covid Commemoration canvassed several dates for the remembrance of Covid-19. These included March 5, the date of the first UK death from Covid-19; March 11, the date the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic; and March 23, the start of the UK’s first national lockdown. When no clear consensus emerged, the Commission opted for the first Sunday in March.

However, for reasons that are unclear, the new Labour government chose the second Sunday, which this year fell on March 9. Whether deliberate or not, this cannot help but echo Remembrance Sunday, the service held each year at the Cenotaph to recall the fallen of the First World War and commemorate the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918.

And as with Armistice Day, the services went ahead at multiple locations across the UK simultaneously. These included the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire; the National Covid Memorial Wall on Albert Embankment; and myriad town halls up and down the country (only the Welsh government chose not to participate, leaving it to community groups to organise local ceremonies as they saw fit).

But perhaps the most significant decision was to style March 9 a “Day of Reflection”, rather than a Day of Remembrance. This was a deliberate attempt by the Commission on Covid Commemoration to bridge the gap between those who felt the government could and should have done more to protect the vulnerable by locking down sooner, and those who felt the threat of Covid-19 had been exaggerated and that the lockdowns and restrictions on funerals had been unnecessary.

These are issues that will be debated at the final module of the UK’s Covid-19 public inquiry. Only at the end of the inquiry, when the inquiry’s chair Baroness Heather Hallett delivers her report, will we be able to say what we got right and what we got wrong, and hopefully reach some sort of consensus.

Until then, the Commission has wisely recognised that remembrance of the pandemic needs to encompass both those who died with Covid-19 on their death certificate and those who were unable to access vital NHS services and died of other causes. In both cases, the disruption to mourning and bereavement practices was traumatic. The difference is that while for groups like Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, the suspension of mourning rituals sparked anger at the then Conservative administration’s failure to lock down sooner, in the case of other bereaved groups it was the decision to prioritise the elderly and vulnerable sections of the population at the expense of other NHS users.

The result has been a characteristically British compromise. In a poem read at the National Memorial Arboretum, Michael Rosen, the ex-Children’s Laureate, who contracted Covid-19 during the first national lockdown and spent 48 days in a coma in intensive care, recalled the heroism and sacrifice of doctors and nurses:

“The risks you took for working on and on/ The fatigue and strain have never gone.”

At the same time, Rosen reached out to bereaved families on both sides of the political divide. "A shadow passed over us and hundreds of thousands of people felt the sudden and unexpected loss of loved ones," he said. "Thanks to the expertise and care I received, I came through, but I look back over my shoulder and think of those who didn't.”

The ceremony at the National Covid Memorial Wall also put the bereaved at the heart of its service as, led by a Highland piper, families of the Covid dead processed past photographs of their absent loved ones hung along Albert Embankment. On reaching Lambeth Bridge, there were echoes of the Remembrance Sunday service when the London fire brigade fired a water cannon from a boat moored on the Thames. Then, after waiting for the chimes of Big Ben and a minute’s silence, the bereaved cast long-stemmed carnations into the river. Red carnations, of course, are a symbol of deep love and affection, but they also could not help but recall the symbolism of the Remembrance Day poppy, representing the heroism and sacrifices of servicemen and women in WWI.

“Today is not just a chance for us to look back and reflect,” said the MP for Lambeth Florence Eshalomi. “It’s about how we honour those who died, it’s about how we remember people who are still living with Covid-19, it’s about ensuring how we as a country never pay that high price again going forward and we learn the lessons as being shown at the inquiry.”

The point was not lost on the members of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice (CBFFJ), who were instrumental in persuading the government to commission the inquiry in the first place.

But perhaps the symbol most closely associated with the Covid Day of Reflection is the red heart. The symbol emerged organically in the first days of lockdown when people began spontaneously posting red heart emojis on the Facebook page set up by CBFFJ. Then, when at the end of the second national lockdown, CBFFJ activists began brainstorming ideas for an unofficial memorial, someone suggested drawing the hearts on the Portland stone wall on Albert Embankment.

That the hearts, which number more than 230,000 - one for every Briton who died with Covid-19 as the cause on their death certificate, are instantly recognisable owes much to the wall’s juxtaposition with Parliament on the Westminster side of the river, from where they resemble a reproachful smear of blood. The other factor is the way that during the Partygate scandal the wall became a backdrop for broadcasters keen to drive home the contrast between those who had died obeying the government’s restrictions and the ministers and Downing Street staff who had flouted them.

I understand that talks on making the wall a permanent feature of Albert Embankment are now at an advanced stage as Lambeth Council and St Thomas’s hospital, on whose grounds the wall rests, try to reach an agreement with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

There is much to hammer out, including who will own the wall going forward – St Thomas’s or Lambeth? – and how best to secure its charitable status. There is also the question of the wall’s ongoing upkeep: at present a group of volunteers, known as Friends of the Wall, gather at the wall every Friday to restore the red paint and clean graffiti from the stone.

But perhaps the biggest question of all is whether the wall should continue to be an open-ended memorial? New hearts are being added every week as the death toll from Covid-19 continues to mount – at time of writing the figure is 247,553. If the memorial is to become permanent and there is to be closure, at some point this counting will have to stop.

But the WHO has yet to declare the pandemic over. And as much as we may want the virus to stop evolving, it continues to mutate and people continue to fall sick and suffer new bereavements.

Five years into the biggest pandemic in a century it is understandable that some of us should want to move on and forget. But the shadow cast by Covid-19 is a long one and many of us are still trying to make sense of it.