Five Years Since the Onset of Covid-19: When Will We Talk About It?

It has been five years since the world was thrust into the unprecedented challenges of Covid-19. With this milestone of five years on and as global challenges continue to grow, Vanessa McHardy encourages us to use this anniversary as a chance to create meaning with your communities, be that in schools, workplaces, or local groups to document and capture our living history.

Child placing their boat onto their classes sea art project.

In the beginning...

In the winter of 2020, at the end of January, I was on my way as far west as I could go from London — six hours driving on the M4. I was heading to my friend’s husband’s 40th birthday in Pembroke, Wales. My husband was meant to be with me, but we had decided to immigrate back to New Zealand, where we both originated from, and had bought a business. He had flown to NZ to do due diligence. Before boarding his flight to return to London, I said to him, “There’s something happening in China. When you're flying through Hong Kong, don’t touch anything.”

Over the next seven weeks, we learned more and more about that ‘something.’

That same friend called me on Tuesday, 17th March, saying she was in town: “Did I want to meet for dinner?” I said yes, even though I was tired—I had missed seeing her regularly since she left London for the Midlands a year earlier. We met at Prezzo by Euston station, talking about this virus in Wuhan, what was happening in Italy, and how she had heard the Red Cross was mobilising in the UK. “It’s just mad,” we said. We hugged goodbye not knowing that in less than a week, hugging would become something we were no longer allowed to do, nor that we would not see each other again until the October.

I worked in schools, and staff rooms were buzzing with speculation. Ireland had gone into something called a ‘lockdown,’ and rumours were swirling that we would too. I remember sitting in a meeting with a good friend and Head Teacher who reassured me: “Don’t worry about your wages, you’re in my budget, so you’re covered.” I was relieved—especially when schools I had worked with for decades said they didn’t know whether they could pay me or other contracted support staff. That one conversation gave me the confidence to set clear boundaries, ensuring I and others in similar positions, worked remotely when we could and got paid.

My daughter’s birthday is in March, and I had planned her party for the weekend before rather than midweek. Thank goodness I did — if I’d scheduled it the weekend after, we would have had to cancel. On her actual birthday, we went to Stratford Westfield. Normally teeming with people, it was eerily empty.

We sat in the food hall eating Vietnamese while staff wiped tables frantically. It felt like we shouldn’t be there, like we were being irresponsible.

Our local coffee shop, Rebel Coffee—(which does the best gluten-free, dairy-free brownies in da world)—was already responding. Alice, the owner, is Italian, and her father is a doctor. She was fully masked up with a distanced payment system long before anything official happened in the UK. She was hearing firsthand how bad it was in Italy — that hospitals had no idea how to treat patients, that they didn’t have enough oxygen, that doctors were making life-and-death decisions without knowing what they were dealing with. At the time, I thought she was being a bit over the top. One thing was clear, we didn't know what what was happening and that was very scary.

Lockdowns begin around the world...

In the Head teachers office of the school I had worked in for 17 years, the executive team was trying to decipher the Department of Education’s directives one of which was that key workers’ children would still be coming to school—but which parents were key workers? The logistics being worked out on a backdrop of "what the heck is going on!" no one had a reference for this type of situation, at such a big unknown scale. When all the school staff gathered to be told we were going into a national lockdown on the 23rd March, we were crammed into the staffroom, looking at each other with concern, worry, confusion, and uncertainty.

Those of us who worked with vulnerable children were particularly terrified—school was often the safest part of their day, the place where they got a warm meal and had fun. SENCOs quickly put wellbeing calls into action for the most vulnerable children, especially those on safeguarding orders or in homes where we knew the parents struggled.

In the UK Boris Johnson initially spoke about herd immunity, but that quickly shifted to lockdowns. Suddenly, we were all in our homes, alone or with family, 24/7, allowed only 30 minutes of outdoor exercise each day.

It was surreal—and I think, for many of us, it still feels that way, like a bad movie where you never quite grasp the plot.

For those in good relationships, warm homes, and with gardens, the pause from the usual rush of life was initially welcome. But for those in abusive relationships or cramped, mould-ridden tower blocks, the only solace was the good weather—at least you could get outside.

The word “furlough” was unknown until suddenly, it was part of daily life. Many friends found themselves furloughed and took on factory jobs for extra income or simply to have something to do. Those of us in education scrambled to figure out how to teach children remotely. Parents were working from home on ‘Zoom,’ while kids had to get ‘online’ for class.

Great things happened too — Joe Wicks’ 9 AM workout became a lifeline, a shared moment of connection across the country.

What happened next...

The week before lockdown, I met with the head of the Lars Windhorst Foundation, a European charity. My work in schools focused on teaching the neuroscience of learning—what happens when a child doesn’t understand something, how their body reacts, and what unhelpful behaviours they do unconsciously to avoid the pain of shame around not understanding. Sarah, from the charity, hesitated before shaking my hand. “Do we shake hands?” We did, laughing nervously. No one really knew what to do.

A month into lockdown, Sarah got in touch. “What can we do to support children?” she asked. I told her, “Right now, we can’t help the kids directly—but we can support parents and staff with wellbeing sessions.” Within a week, I had written a proposal, met with the charity directors over Zoom, and secured funding. I reached out to my colleague Janet Williams, and together, we built a website with resources and began offering workshops—first online, then in person once schools reopened at the end of June.

Families gather to look at the living history quilt the children and parents had made as a whole school project.

I am incredibly proud of that work. We supported over 12,000 parents, staff, and students. Some schools took our suggestion to create collective art pieces, capturing this moment in living history. We called the project Same Sea, Different Boats—a way to bring more dimension to the government’s messaging that “we’re all in this together,” which felt trite given the vastly different realities people were facing. Even for individuals, each day could swing from feeling okay to being utterly overwhelmed.

Time itself became distorted—each day felt endless, yet weeks passed in a blur.

I have often mentioned that our approach to handling COVID-19 mirrors our response after the World Wars—we simply avoid discussing it. We don't address the fear, the negative impacts on an entire generation of children, the isolation and loneliness experienced by the elderly, or the young adults who now find it difficult to face normal challenges. Instead, the Education department instructed us children needed to 'catch up'. However, anyone familiar with mental health understands that healing involves processing—forming a narrative around an event to move it into memory. Yet even two years later, with restrictions still in place, there still was "no time" to process. The collective dissonance was evident—no one wanted to acknowledge what we had endured.

Then the war in Ukraine began.

Then the energy crisis.

Then the cost-of-living crisis.

Now, at the five-year anniversary of the pandemic, no widespread meaning-making has been done. And as any therapist knows, this is not a good place for us to be.

Five years on...

Now, the very people who demanded children “catch up” are asking why education is in crisis—why attendance is at an all-time low, why hundreds of thousands of children are missing school due to anxiety. Anorexia doubled during COVID. And yet, no one wants to make the time or space to process what happened. But if we don’t, the impacts will continue, playing out in the behaviours of our children and the dysfunction we see today.

Free workbook resources

We created free resources for schools to do just that — to process, to put thoughts and feelings about covid into words, to acknowledge what this time was like. These come in the form of stories with workbook questions, ideal for literacy classes or project-based learning, so these can be used in your usual literacy lessons - we know how pressurised the curriculum is so this is our covid operation to help you do what is needed!

If your school wants support, we are offering staff meetings at half our usual fee because we believe it is critical to use this five-year anniversary to talk about COVID—rather than burying the trauma, as past generations did.

People died. Abuse happened. Lives changed forever. We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to remember.

Click here to download our post covid integration resources, ‘Capturing Living History’ for your school and/or book a one-hour staff meeting to enable your teachers to facilitate this very important and needed piece of work that will enable us all to move forward with more settlement than we will if we continue to pretend it didn't happen.

Let's stop the cycle of denial and burying difficult life events, we can do better and we need to do better.