Finn McRedmond: Covid was a new contour in an existing culture war

At long last the WHO declared the pandemic over, well, sort of. To be more precise it has announced that Covid-19 is no longer a “public health emergency of international concern”. For fans of arbitrary milestones, this is about as big as it gets. But as we have long understood the pandemic does not end with an announcement, nor with a stocktake of epidemiological data, but with a vibe. The pandemic ended when we stopped thinking about it everyday – thanks to fatigue more than anything else. Or, just as they say about bankruptcy: it happened very slowly and then all at once.

I remember one of the worst days of the pandemic in England. It was Monday evening on April 6th, 2020, and word had broken that Boris Johnson – prime minister at the time – had been transferred to the intensive care unit in St Thomas’s Hospital, just on the other side of the Thames to the Houses of Parliament. Something strange happens when a nation’s leader – no matter how one feels about them personally – is severely incapacitated at a time of national crisis. WhatsApp lit up as every group chat whirred into action. “This is very weird” more than one message read. Now it all feels as though it were a fever dream.

The pandemic has not been a fashionable talking point for quite some time now. It is almost as though three years ago we were not thrust into the most unfamiliar set of circumstances any of us had faced: locked down; discussing foreign concepts like “flattening the curve” and “zero-Covid”; with a new found familiarity with chief medical officers and the epidemiological pundit class. Instead it has all been consigned to a hazy memory. Millions of deaths, businesses destroyed, education seriously disrupted. How quick we are to forget.

Covid-19 made the case for the centre ground. The political forces of moderation were the ultimate victors

So, what is the legacy of the pandemic? The true answer to that may not be revealed to us for decades – it is hard to identify the contours of a moment when you are living through it. But if there is one short-term lesson it is this: Covid-19 made the case for the centre ground. The political forces of moderation were the ultimate victors.

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It is rather easy to see the pandemic as the moment that the world – specifically in the liberal west – cemented its route down the harshly-lit path of polarisation. Coronavirus merely came to finish off what Donald Trump had started: separating the world into camps, as though they were allocated at birth; siphoning politics through the extremities of tribalism.

In the case of the pandemic it was the “zero-Covid lockdown forever” zealots versus “the whole thing is an overblown hoax” cynics. And numerous surveys and polling have pointed to evidence of this partisan divide: Republican states saw higher case rates, support for mask-wearing was higher among Democrats. Covid was merely a new contour in an existing culture war.

In Ireland and the UK it was less stark. But both still saw their fair share of anti-vax protests and zero-Covid advocacy. Ireland’s government erred on the cautious side. According to UCD analysis, it had one of the most stringent lockdowns in Europe. England was softer: not just by decree but by social attitudes too. In any case, arguments about ventilation and restrictions morphed into identities. In London, wearing - or not wearing - a mask came to mean as much about political affiliation as it did about the disease.

But that was then. Now, with hindsight, it looks different. Of course it is satisfying to decry the partisanship and the polarisation running our countries into the ground; to say that Covid was a breeding ground of conspiratorial thinking and also an excuse for the State to overweeningly interfere in our private lives. But looking back it is very clear that neither the lockdown-zealots nor the Covid-sceptics got it right.

Because if we have learned anything it is that managing a pandemic is about managing competing interests; that most people are basically decent and shouldn’t be under the thumb of extremists; that western optimism about the hasty arrival of the vaccine was a good thing; and that the harsher the lockdown the worse its knock-on effects.

It also taught us that Jacinda Ardern – by closing New Zealand’s borders for over two years, denying her nation the ability to psychologically move on from the worst throes of the pandemic – got it just as wrong as any mainstream denier did. It is not a particularly sexy conclusion at all, but the pandemic taught us something very obvious indeed: the middle way is (usually) right.

Because a life cannot be measured solely by its longevity, it must also be measured by its quality. Damage was wrought by excessively harsh lockdown, and damage was wrought by conspiratorial Covid deniers. Those who navigated it best sought a way through, maintaining a gentle balancing act. The pandemic reminded us that good politics is about trade-offs. Let’s hope we don’t forget that too soon.