Lockdown anniversary: good things that came out of terrible year

Exactly a year ago today, Boris Johnson gave a televised address to warn of the “biggest threat this country has faced for decades”.

Since then, everyday life in both the UK and worldwide has changed drastically as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, with populations ordered to stay at home during lockdowns that have kept friends and families apart and triggered widespread job losses. Despite the tough restrictions, the coronavirus has claimed more than 2.7 million lives across the globe, including more than 126,000 in Britain.

But as the rollout of Covid vaccines provides light at the end of the tunnel, here we reflect on some of the other much-needed glimmers of hope that have emerged amid the devastation of the past 12 months.

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Drop in air pollution

Scientists at Nasa have recorded “significant reductions” in air pollutants in Earth’s atmosphere since February last year, with much of the decline attributed to drops in transportation and industrial output during the health crisis.

Using computer models to compare current pollution levels with those that would have been expected after a “Covid-free 2020”, the US space agency’s experts calculated that global nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels have been reduced by “almost 20%”.

The declines are especially marked over many major cities. In the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the pandemic, NO2 emissions were 60% lower than would be expected, with a similar reduction in Milan and a 45% decrease in New York.

Making jobs work for staff

The Covid-enforced shift to working from home has proved popular among white-collar workers, according to polls.

Four in five people are hoping to work from home at least one day a week next year, according to a recently published survey of almost 5,000 UK residents by Prolific on behalf of the University of Nottingham and Stanford University.

Britain’s businesses are already starting to prepare for new set-ups for their staff, with Covid causing “companies of all sizes to rethink their need for offices”, says the Financial Times. The extent of the office exodus can be measured through the property market, with estate agent Savills reporting six million square feet of “so-called grey space on the sublet market, twice the pre-pandemic level”, the newspaper adds.

Out of this world events

People worldwide have been been going online to discover new ways to get their cultural fixes during the pandemic. Data from ticketing and events company Eventbrite shows that consumers spent 34 times more time attending virtual events in November than at the start of 2020. Almost 75 million attendees registered for a total of more than one million virtual events on the platform last year, spending more than 100 million hours enjoying events beamed directly into their homes.

And “while nothing can replace the experience of live events in-person, virtual events have proved to be an excellent substitute”, says Eventbrite. A YouGov survey commissioned by the firm of more than 3,000 consumers in the UK, US and Australia found that more than half intend to attend both virtual and in-person events in the future.

Boosting vaccine development

Governments around the world are now much better prepared to combat all sorts of infectious diseases. But the greatest impact of the race to stop Covid may be the acceleration of the development of so-called RNA vaccines.

Whereas traditional vaccines “work by infecting the recipient with inert or ‘dead’ pathogens in order to jump-start an immune response”, RNA vaccines “aren’t entire pathogens but merely their ‘messenger’ RNA, which produces a similar response from the immune system”, explains Inc. magazine. And “because they don’t require the entire pathogen, RNA vaccines are safer to administer, easier to produce, and potentially more versatile”.

That verdict was echoed by Bill Gates at the GeekWire virtual conference in October. Describing RNA vaccines as “very promising”, the billionaire philanthropist said that “we want to use that platform to try and do an HIV vaccine, malaria vaccine and TB vaccine”.

Women leading the way

Under the rule of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand is one of the few countries in the world that has managed to eradicate the virus from its shores. And as The New York Times has noted, Ardern’s success is part of “a widely noticed trend: countries led by women seem to be particularly successful in fighting the coronavirus”.

Research published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the World Economic Forum suggests that this success “may be explained by the proactive and coordinated policy responses” adopted by female leaders.

Pointing to examples such as Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, report co-author Supriya Garikipati, a developmental economist at Liverpool University, told The Guardian that “in almost all cases, they locked down earlier than male leaders in similar circumstances”.

“While this may have longer-term economic implications, it has certainly helped these countries to save lives,” Garikipati said.