The fact that only around a third of Canadians found the pandemic measures excessive is troubling. One must assume that the other two thirds were either okay with the measures or felt they were insufficient.

Thirty-six per cent of Canadians agree with the notion that government reactions to the pandemic were exaggerated, according to the poll by Leger for the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS).

People in the Prairies and Alberta were more likely to have a negative perception of the decisions taken by government. Forty-seven per cent of Albertans and 45 per cent of Manitoba and Saskatchewan respondents agreed the COVID response was exaggerated.

But the “much too much, almost zealotry, related to being vaccinated” also came back to haunt public health officials, said Bowman, who has spoken out about how the unvaccinated were demonized as right-wing radicals. The vaccine passports and mandates had a politically polarizing impact, creating an “us-vs-them” mentality, he said.

The economic damage caused by the lockdowns was bad enough and obvious to most, but there’s another side to that travesty that is less talked about.

The lockdown babies are now starting school, and the impact of their extraordinary early days is stark. “There’s a school in Birmingham where more than half the children entering [Reception] were still wearing nappies,” says Paskins. “Before the pandemic there might have been one or two. Now more than half have that developmental delay, and what that means in terms of how children are able to learn and function.”

The other thing that was really bad about Covid and the lockdown was that we were threatened with the idea that if we passed it on to somebody, we’d almost be responsible for their death. It just made life so miserable.”

She adds: “A lot of people have never really quite recovered. I would say it took me at least two years, and even now lots of my friendships are impacted.”