One year on from the start of the first lockdown, the brutal price of this drastic policy is all too obvious. Amid battered public finances, rising unemployment and widespread business failures, entire sectors of the economy have been devastated.
At the same time, the quality of life for most of the population has been profoundly diminished, just as education from primary to degree level has been undermined and non-Covid healthcare disrupted.
Covid-dominated Britain is a bleak unnatural land where all our ordinary freedoms are locked away.
The advocates of lockdown argue that this approach has been necessary to tackle the unique challenges of coronavirus.
But I believe that the heavy-handedness of these measures has been out of all proportion to the level of threat –and worse, they have also been ineffective, even counter-productive.