Public Likely To Comply With Lockdown Measures To Halt New Pandemic, Poll Suggests
The first national Covid-19 lockdown was announced five years ago on 23 March 2020 (Alamy)
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Five years on from the first coronavirus lockdown, three-quarters of the UK public say they are more likely or just as likely to support full lockdown measures to prevent the spread of a pandemic as they were in 2020.
Responding to a Savanta poll of 2,205 people last weekend, 38 per cent of respondents said they would be more likely to comply with full lockdown measures now in response to a new pandemic, compared to in 2020.
36 per cent said they would comply to the same level as they did five years ago, while only 22 per cent said they would be less likely to comply.
There were also party political divisions over whether people have changed their minds on lockdowns: people who currently intend to vote for Reform UK and Plaid Cymru were the only groups more likely to say they would comply less with lockdowns now.
Only 25 per cent of those who intend to vote Reform UK and 20 per cent of Plaid Cymru voters said they would be more compliant with lockdowns now, compared to 50 per cent of people who intend to vote Labour.
44 per cent of Conservative supporters, 40 per cent of Lib Dems, 43 per cent of Greens and 40 per cent of SNP voters said they would be more likely to comply with lockdowns in 2025.
The polling also showed that in the event of a new pandemic of an unknown disease, the majority of people would support a full lockdown lasting a period between four weeks and 16 weeks – but public support decreases significantly once a lockdown extends beyond 16 weeks (around four months).
Generally, people were more likely to support primary and secondary schools closing if a new pandemic emerged this year – 42 per cent for primary schools and 41 per cent for secondary schools respectively.
34 per cent of people said they would be just as likely to support schools closing now as they did in 2020. However, 64 per cent said they had concerns about the lasting impact of the previous Covid-19 lockdowns on children and young people, while only 31 per cent were not concerned.
A majority of people (60 per cent) said they were concerned about the risk of another global pandemic in the near future, but there was a relatively high level of trust (62 per cent) in the ability of the National Health Service to respond effectively if another pandemic occurs.
54 per cent said they would expect schools to also respond effectively, but only 44 per cent said the same for the government.
The polling showed that people are split down the middle on whether they think the UK Covid Inquiry is doing an effective job to reveal and learn from the mistakes made by the government and the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic. 44 per cent said they were confident and 44 per cent also said they were not confident.
Experts believe there is a significant risk that another pandemic could spread around the world, and there is concern among some scientists about the lack of research into whether the public would respond differently to non-pharmaceutical measures such as lockdowns or social distancing to prevent the transmission of disease. There has also been little research into how effective these measures were during Covid.
Professor John Edmunds, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a previous member of Sage, previously told The House magazine: “All of that [research] needs to be done, and we’re unfortunately, a long, long way from that.”
Savanta’s Political Research Director Chris Hopkins said that the new polling could suggest some “tacit admittance” that people did not follow lockdown rules during the Covid-19 pandemic, with more than a third saying they would follow the rules more closely than they did last time.
“There’s still broadly trust in the NHS and schools to respond effectively to a fresh pandemic, but these figures are likely lower than they were in 2020, while trust in government to respond effectively is significantly lower,” Hopkins said.
“Trust in politics is at an all-time low and politicians of all stripes suffer from what the public still believes is a mismanagement of the pandemic by the previous Conservative government.”
Additional reporting by Matilda Martin.
