by Gordon Rayner at The Telegraph
Failures in the UK’s pandemic response are not hard to identify, but on one front the Government’s success is undeniable: persuading a fearful nation to stay locked indoors for much of the past year.
The daily diet of statistics on deaths, hospitalisations and Covid cases has been so effective that compliance with lockdown has gone far beyond what ministers expected.
But the problem with fear, as one behavioural scientist said on Friday, is that “you can’t turn it on and off like a tap”.
As the country prepares for the complete end of lockdown in June, there are far-reaching questions about how many people will return to the workplace, or to normality, and the consequences of that for the economy and for physical and mental health...