Five years on

What pandemic data do we still have, and what are the ongoing consequences?

It’s been a little over five years since the UK first entered lockdown at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Somehow, it simultaneously feels like a long time ago and not that long at all. It’s funny how your entire way of life changing for months or years will do that.

Shoppers queuing to enter Tesco Gillingham in 2020.

While things are essentially ‘normal’ again now¹, it’s easy to understate just how strange and scary that first year was. Not leaving the house for weeks on end is something that feels alien to most of us, and even when we did, things were strange. Most places were shut, the streets were quiet, and during the early weeks in particular, you got used to crossing the street just because someone was walking on the same side of the road as you.

We’re not here to recall that though. As a Medway news outlet, we’re interested in what the pandemic did to Medway and the impacts it continues to have. Of course, something as big as this is messy and complicated, so no one article is going to cover everything. So consider this something of your five year snapshot.