#London lockdown ending full#

“There’s thousands and thousands, more as time goes past, that think this stuff has been really overblown and there is something a bit fishy about it.”Īlthough these are minority views, polls suggest the numbers are significant. The case failed, but as it picked up media attention, people contacted him to express their support – mostly small business owners, he said, and others directly affected by strict lockdown rules. Early in the pandemic, Dolan, who owns a chartered airline and a motor-racing team and lives in Monaco, attempted to prove through the courts that lockdown was unlawful. “A lot of people think that they’re the only ones that think like they do, and they’re not,” the British businessman Simon Dolan told me in January. On New Year’s Eve, a doctor at St Thomas’ hospital in London filmed a crowd of protesters who had gathered outside holding placards and chanting “Covid is a hoax”. Occasionally, the most extreme activists have taken direct action: setting fire to 5G masts which they suspected of spreading the virus, entering Covid wards and attempting to remove relatives, visiting hospitals to film empty corridors and posting them as “evidence” that the public is being lied to about the numbers of sick and dying. Over the past year, these views have attracted more and more adherents. At the other were Covid sceptics or anti-lockdowners, those who thought that the numbers were exaggerated or that the government had an ulterior motive for restricting freedoms. At the most extreme end were outright Covid deniers, those who believed that the virus didn’t exist and the pandemic had been fabricated. During the first few months of the pandemic, a broad movement coalesced online. “It was to make me feel better, so I wouldn’t be as scared.”Īnna was not the only one to respond this way.

I was looking into that, and how many people who died had pre-existing health conditions,” she said.

“Loads of people were saying ‘even if you die from a heart attack, they’ll put it down as a Covid death’.

#London lockdown ending full#

Some of it seemed implausible to Anna, but it was enough to convince her that the media wasn’t telling the full story. On Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, they came across theories about the origins of coronavirus that the mainstream media weren’t talking about – that it was engineered in a lab in China, say, or that it had been artificially spliced with HIV. She considered suicide.įeeling abandoned by the government and frustrated by the daily press briefings, Anna and her partner researched the virus online. Other business expenses – insurance, bills – went on her credit card. The cash grant, when it finally came, fell far short. For weeks, she waited anxiously for news about support for shuttered businesses. “I was in a terrified bubble, having the news on constantly, crying, worrying, panicking,” she told me. Anna was convinced that if she caught Covid, she would die. She could no longer pay for the weekly counselling that had been helping her deal with her troubled childhood. She was forced to close her business, a small tattoo studio that she had opened two years earlier, at the age of 24. The surgery was cancelled, leaving her in excruciating pain.

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, Anna, a young woman from Bradford, was waiting for surgery for endometriosis.