Covid Caution
More than one in five people are still worried about going to busy places because of the virus
Over the last seven months and twenty issues of this newsletter, we’ve explored the slow future using a wide variety of data.
With a couple of notable exceptions, it’s generally been pretty long term data. Sometimes very long term – the weight of footballs and the age at marriage going back to the 1800s, attitudes to homosexuality since the 1980s, trends in poverty since the 1990s. We’ve looked at 60 years of employment data and concluded that we’re never going to stop working, and 20 years of eating fruit and veg and found that we’d increased our consumption by two-thirds of a plum. One of the more recent time-series we looked at was the impact August seems to have on optimism and outlook, which only took us back to 2018.
But in this issue, we’re only looking back a few years. This time, our data start in May 2020, and they concern our attitude to coronavirus.
It’s easy to feel very post-pandemic at the moment. A big part of that is because we are post-pandemic. The WHO declared an official end to the pandemic earlier this year. That came over a year after the final bits of Covid legislation were removed from the UK statute book.
We’re also post-pandemic in the way we talk and think about Covid, for the most part. Covid tests just sit alongside other items in the pharmacy. A positive result (if you take one, after all, they aren’t free anymore) doesn’t typically result in panic and full scale isolation but just light duties. For many people, Covid has become just another bug that we all get from time to time.
But the data suggest it is a little more than that. Around one in five people aren’t just inconvenienced by Covid, they’re still actively cautious about it. Worried enough to say it either prevents them going to busy places, or makes them think twice about it.
For while after restrictions were eased in 2021 the proportion of Covid Cautious people was declining quite fast. It dropped from 54% in April 2021 (at the time that pubs and other venues started reopening) to 33% a year later. But the trend since then has been largely flat. It carried on falling throughout 2021, reaching 22% of people in Sept. Since then, it has consistently hovered between 21% and 25%. In other words, at any given point in the last two years, between one in four and one in five people have been worried enough about Covid for it to affect their behaviour.
The chart above fits the core Slow Futures criterion of being quite boring. The next one strikes me as quite interesting. The group currently sustaining the trend are the under 40s. The youngest group were the least concerned back in 2020. But those that were worried were really worried, because they’re still wary about busy places.
At the very outset of the pandemic, Professor Graham Medley – who became a household name over the following year – said: “This is the kind of event that is going to live on for decades in people’s minds”. He was absolutely right. A pandemic is an era-defining thing. The attitudes driven by it change very slowly. In this case, for some people, they are not changing at all.
What does this mean?
It's unclear why it’s younger generations that are most concerned about Covid at the moment. Perhaps they’re less likely to be dismissive of the lingering threat, perhaps because they’ve had fewer health scares to live and learn from. It’s possible that it will fade with more time. But it’s also possible that it doesn’t, and this becomes an enduring feature of these generations’ outlook as they age.
A quarter of the population is not a fringe group, but a very significant minority that forces businesses to adapt. It may even grow as the Covid inquiry highlights failings in preparedness, resilience and infrastructure.
Legacy concern about Covid might be there all the time, but is likely to be especially acute when cases are high. Our recent Optimism Index data for October this year found both a drop in Optimism and a spike in concern about the NHS, which corresponded with a spike in Covid cases. Mask wearing and dialling down social occasions could become seasonal behaviours, especially ahead of events that people are keen to ‘protect’ like holidays or Christmas.
There are new hygiene factors for any public facing business. Ventilation is likely to become an essential demand, not just because of lingering caution about Covid but because we know so much more about how viruses transmit now. At the start of the pandemic, we thought you could catch Covid from someone sitting across from you in a restaurant. By the end of it, we knew you could catch it from someone across the other side of the restaurant. You could catch it from someone who left the restaurant before you came in. Maybe the Covid Cautious have a point after all.