Five years on: the Covid-19 lockdown legacy

Five years ago this weekend the UK entered its first national lockdown. To help curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus we had to stay at home, were forbidden from travelling and encouraged to isolate. 

From the start, older people were among those worst affected. The over 70s and those deemed vulnerable because of underlying health conditions were asked to shield, which meant they shouldn’t leave the house for exercise or shopping. Early on it also became clear that older people were more likely to become seriously unwell and die if they contracted Covid-19. 

What unfolded over the following weeks, months and years is still being felt today. Around 90% of deaths from Covid-19 in Scotland were people over the age of 65. Prolonged periods of lockdown affected hundreds of thousands of older people. Vital social connections were lost. Rates of loneliness and isolation rose. Social distancing and face coverings created a culture of fear and mistrust from which some older people have still not recovered. 

At Age Scotland, where calls to our helpline shot up from around 70 a day before the pandemic, to 850 on some days, we heard first-hand the concerns of older people over rights violations, access to fair and equal medical treatment, inappropriate use of do not attempt resuscitation orders, the transfer of Covid-19-positive positive patients into care homes, and how physical and mental health was affected by policy decisions. 

In care homes, death rates were shockingly high and the impact of being isolated without visits from loved ones had a huge and damaging impact on residents’ wellbeing. Many relatives of those living with dementia reported a significant decline in their condition once they were finally allowed to see them again.  

In Edinburgh the Scottish Covid-19 Inquiry into Scotland’s strategic handling of the pandemic is ongoing. When it delivers its findings, it will identify lessons for the future and make recommendations. 

But for older people who lived through Covid-19, and for the families and loved ones of the almost 20,000 people who died, they live with their pandemic experience every day. The lives of so many older people were devasted by Covid-19, and five years on they are still struggling to overcome the isolation of lockdown. It took a while for community groups to get up and running again, but physical decline and frailty brought on by being stuck at home meant that some older people were simply no longer able to attend. 

For most people the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic are in the past, although the virus is still around. Earlier this month 71 people in Scotland were recorded as having Covid and 34 of them were hospitalised. 

But for many older people Covid legacy lives on in physical ill health, fewer opportunities to socialise and mental health issues. Others have a sense of injustice linked to a failure to provide adequate and timely PPE, the discharge of older hospital patients into care homes after they were diagnosed with Covid and the seemingly indiscriminate – and damaging - use of DNAR orders. These issues will quite rightly take longer than five years to fade into history.