Life and Family Travel in the Time of COVID-19: Pandemic in England 2020

Abstract

This reports an exploratory attempt at a real–time account of COVID’s physical and social impacts on society, particularly family behavior, as the pandemic spread through England during 2020. Particular focus is on its effects on movement, travel and social relations and the contradictions for many in the way these were personally experienced, compared with media representations of national life during COVID. The study started with a sketch of historical pandemics in order to situate COVID contextually in relation to pandemics of the past. This was followed by a year-long, mixed-methodology, qualitative survey combining: diary observations, participant observation, unobtrusive observation, interviews, and oral reports by, and from, observer-informants at different locations in England. The results are reported in tabular form as 10 tracked outcomes, alongside each of which are notes, suggesting how actions might be derived as responsive measures to them in managing future pandemics.

1. Introduction

What would living through a pandemic be like? How would it be remembered? And what lessons would it hold for the future? The raison d’etre of this exploratory study was an attempt to capture the novelty of an unprecedented, historical moment as it happened, the first time in living memory that a significant, life-threatening pandemic affected life in England. It focused on its impacts on family mobilities in the widest sense as physical movements in quotidian travel and recreational tourism, but also as ideological movement, dissemination and contestation, which was significantly framed and affected by, and within, the saturation coverage of traditional and digital media.

Several factors made such a real “real time” investigation a difficult one to conduct. One was the time factor between first awareness of COVID and its spread across England, which ruled out a premeditated, research design of any complexity. A second was that the progressive restrictions on travel and interpersonal association by government, which ended in total lockdown, made research requiring extensive sampling and field-interviewing difficult, as well as shutting down organizations (universities, research companies) that might have initiated and managed them. A third factor was the absence of relevant, academic literature on how continuing monitoring of pandemic behavior in England might be conducted over a sustained period.

2. Methodology

The solution was an observational mix that began as a personal diary by the writer with notes on behavior in his own neighbourhood, which was then opportunistically extended by visits and phone contact with a number of relative/friend/acquaintance families in the North, South and Central parts of England. Each was questioned about his/her family’s life under COVID there, and then asked to comment on, and “sound out”, the views of other people in their localities, and if possible, those of others the others knew. Original family respondents thereby became both respondents and respondent provocateurs, encouraging other people’s testimony that could be passed on with their own. The network became an expanding, clearing-house of regional contacts in a kind of oral, “chain-letter” procedure, similar to the respondent gathering technique known to researchers as “Snowballing” in which one respondent is asked to suggest others with a similar profile—here, families living through the COVID crisis—who might be surveyed. Contact with the main formants was maintained by further visits, phone or social media.

This “do-it-yourself” strategy, using a small number of volunteer witnesses to report their own behavior and observe local others, on “state-of-the-nation” issues at times of time of crisis, was informed by the spirit of the public opinion studie, pioneered by Mass Observation group, just before, and during the Second World War. The group made use of diarist-observers who recorded their own behavior, and described that of others in a variety of studies that the group named as soundings in the, “anthropology of every life”(see [1,2,3], for descriptions and samples of Mass Observation’s work).The author had previously adapted some of their procedures in tourism studies [4,5,6].

The other research precedent in this exploratory venture into investigating the unknown under conditions of temporal and spatial constraint was Grounded Theory. This was a philosophy proposed for building knowledge of social phenomena about which little was known or understood, using improvised methods and means creatively [7,8,9]. Its aim was to build a “knowledge tree” from the “ground” up, drawing on whatever kind and number of resources researchers judged to have relevant bearing, directly or indirectly, on the inquiry at hand. No kind of relevant data or data capture was ruled out. The “whatever-it-takes” permissiveness allowed in Grounded Theory in data choice and collection, has similarity with the concept of bricollage, a notion coined by the anthropologist, Levi-Strauss, in describing how, on occasion he had stumbled on serendipitous materials he might never have considered, but later embraced, and even looked in his researches, “creating things out of whatever comes to hand” [10] p. 54). The sources and methodologies of G.T. have included: questionnaire surveys, literary texts, official statistics, company documents, film narratives, news reports, found objects, casual conversations, and inspection of sites, settings and locations. Pride of place, however, commonly privileged the observations and testimony of different varieties of affected others. Medical research, for example, might include the reported experiences, not only of the “usual suspects”—patients, nurses, doctors, and surgeons—but ward cleaners, caterers, drivers, hospital visitors, and other involved, but not empowered, informants offering their perceptions and opinions relating to a medical issue. Accessing such testimony in real time typically came from direct observation, particularly participant observation, and also from “unobtrusive observation” both of which were deployed in this study. Participant observation is well-known in the social sciences, but “unobtrusive observation” is less commonly admitted. It was first proposed as a “non-reactive” way of information gathering on respondents by: silent study of their verbal and non-verbal behavior: by retrieving and “reading” traces they have left (e.g., examining what they throw out in rubbish bins); and by role-playing a persona with a target respondent that elicits the disclosure of target information. The technique is common in “mystery visitor” surveys conducted in retail and hospitality where an anonymous visitor-observer acts as shopper, diner, or other client figure, and reports on service standards delivered in interactions with organizational employees. In this study it included reported behavior derived from watching, listening, and observing people in many different contexts, e.g., social distancing in restaurants, changing numbers pub drinkers, behavior while out walking, and conversational engagement with people at social events.

Grounded Theory investigations rarely produce results that can be accepted with confidence for decision making or theory building. Their utility is to open up discursive conversations by revealing indicative themes and situated states for further exploration and analysis which can then be inventoried, examined and screened for further study.

The observations in this study took place at indoor and outdoor locations in England between February 2019 and January 2021. They were made mainly in three English regions: the North: Newcastle and the nearby seaside resorts of Tynemouth and Whitley Bay; the Midlands: Birmingham, Halesowen, Matlock, Buxton and Buckingham; and the South/South West: London, Southampton, Frome and Margate. The indoor locations included: private houses, restaurants, guest houses, public vaccine centres, AirbnBs, supermarkets and service stations. Those outdoors included: public parks, seaside promenades, canal tow paths, river banks, piers and green pathways in and around towns used by local walkers. Those interviewed, observed and/or reporting back as informants included: hospital workers, local vaccination staff, councilors, waiters, hotel staff, a retired judge, doctors, nurses, charity workers, and social workers In social character they included attendance and observations at informal gatherings of families and friends, birthday parties, wedding anniversaries, two bank holidays trips, and three funerals (only one was a COVID death, contracted in hospital).

3. Pandemics, Epidemics and the Family in History

Epidemics and pandemics have been a feature of life on the planet in fact and fiction since written records began. They had featured in the Jewish Torah, interpreted as punishments by God inflicted on disobedient Israelites and their enemies. They provided Hippocrates, the founding “legislator of medicine” in ancient Greece with the second longest chapter in his collected works [11]. Between 1348 and 1350 Europe was ravaged by the most famous plague in history, the “Black Death” which was reported by Jean Froissart Chronicles that “at least a third of all the people in the world died” [12]. In Renaissance Italy the plague was the context of Boccaccio’s most famous work, the Decameron, which narrated how lords and ladies fled plague-ridden Florence for the Tuscan Hills and whiled away their time in ribald story-telling. Two centuries later it was his eye witness account of the London plague of 1665 that helped turn the Diary of Samuel Pepys into a classic, and later encouraged Daniel Defoe to venture a “documentary” account, Journal of the Plague Year, that was part fiction, and part official records.

Pandemics and epidemics became major policy issues for governments in nineteenth century England. The Industrial Revolution had created rapid growth of populations concentrated in overcrowded towns and cities where typhoid, cholera and other diseases broke out, particularly in London, and cities in the North and Midlands. Government commissions of inquiry were set up to investigate them, and recommend preventative and remedial measures. They survive to this day in Parliamentary “Blue Books”.

Pandemic history and research flourished in the twentieth century. In 1900, a writer calling himself “Hippocrates Junior” surveyed plagues over the previous 500 years and predicted that a major one was imminent. Within twenty years Spanish flu struck killing more Europeans than the total mortality of the First World War. It set off a period of international, medical research that was halted by the Second World War.

In the 1960s and 1970s plague and pestilence literature made a come-back that included book-length studies of cholera [13,14] and McNeill’s seminal study of pandemics in, “the rise and fall of civilisations” [15]. A continuing stream of books has since followed, focusing on pandemics by time frame and place [16,17,18], and by named plague or disease, among which the Black Death has retained prime position [19,20,21,22,23,24]. Spanish Flu is not far behind [25,26,27,28], and, as a flu form, is seen as more likely to be a threat the developed world than bubonic plague.

In addition to their epidemial content, these studies offer insights into the social and societal consequences of pandemics that were to surface during the COVID crisis as unprecedented novelties for the British public. Knowledge of them might have usefully augmented the official, government briefings and broadcasts. It would have revealed that populations commonly asked 4 main questions when pandemics strike: what caused them; how and by whom they were transmitted; how to prevent and avoid infection; and how to manage and deal with them. Religious and astrological beliefs dominated causal explanations of plagues for many centuries, representing them as acts of God and supernatural forces, but from the eighteenth century explanations have looked to science and human agency [21].

Science looked for non-human causes that included bugs in the air, infected meat, infections spread by air in breathing or talking, and miasmas arising from decomposing bodies in churchyards and overcrowded burial sites. Animals became prime suspects as carriers with dogs, rats, and cattle, all at different times being the main accused.

Human agency in the transmission of infections has been the most divisive causal explanation, and one that has been politicized as a way of scapegoating foreign enemies and alien minorities. Tribal populations blamed witchcraft within or outside the tribe for unexplained diseases. Asian nationals have been cited by the West in disease transmission at home and abroad [28], which made President Trump’s Sino-phobic accusations of about COVID transmission an ancient tradition, as much as news. In reality it has often been smaller, indigenous communities who have succumbed to diseases to which they have had no immunity, imported by invaders or occupiers who do, as was the case in the “discovery” of North and South America.

The most contentious agenda to develop during COVID was about management and control of pandemics, and the freedom of the individual. Its critics accused the government of subverting the liberties of the people in legal controls on their movement and assembly. Reading history would have suggested that every major pandemic had involved the administrative intervention of national or regional government in dealing plague and pestilence, including: disposal of bodies, preventing or limiting infection, problems and dilemmas of enforcement of quarantine; and throughout keeping records of what was done for the next time. The London Plague of 1665 is particularly well-remembered, not just because of Pepys and Defoe, but by an innovation in mortuary account-keeping by City administrators known as, the Bills of Mortality. These were weekly inventories of deaths during the main duration of the plague between April and December, naming their causes and their geographical distribution by city wards.

There was much therefore in past chronicles of pandemics and epidemics that could have been used to anticipate developments in 2020, and inoculate the public against the supposition of novel visitation in which fears most easily ferment.

4. Findings: COVID-19 and the Public in 2020

The most significant feature of the COVID pandemic was not, like earlier ones, the desolating scale of the infection’s physical toll across the population. Compared with the great pandemics of the past COVID’s mortality levels were minor, and less than the one it most closely resembled, the Spanish Flu pandemic after the First World War. The peak period of COVID fatalities numbered 140,000 by May 2020. Thereafter only 40,000 more were added during the next two years, bringing the total to 176,708 in May 2022 [29]. During the Spanish Flu pandemic after the First World War 228,000 died in one year, the first year on record in which deaths exceeded births COVID’s lower mortality levels were confined mainly to a minority of the aging population over 60 [28].

Despite its limited impact as fatal infection, the COVID crisis had profound, socio-economic consequences, and was uniquely disruptive, in its impacts upon the lives of the population. There were in effect two different, dysfunctional entities at work: the infection itself; and the measures installed to deal with it, a duality never noted during historical pandemics. It was the impacts of the coping measures introduced that halted normal life and revealed the extent to which modern societies depended on a network of taken-for-granted mobilities and spatial freedoms, including tourism, as a default condition of satisfactory living.

A key area revealed by the survey was the power and influence of mass media agenda-setting, particularly by TV and the Press, to shape perceptions of the COVID crisis in homes and family in the UK. The fulcrum of this messaging was a televised news conference, transmitted simultaneously on several mainstream TV channels every evening by the government before an audience of journalists, at which ministers and their medical advisors gave updates on the numbers of COVID infections, deaths recorded during the previous week, and set out measures the public should take for avoidance and containment. They included information on legal measures monitored by the police (travel bans, permitted meeting sizes, social distancing, etc.), as well as recommended, best hygienic practices—washing hands, elbow touching instead of hand shaking, etc. The conferences ended with question-and answer sessions at which press and TV journalists grilled the government teams, seeking to clarify and expand on issues arising, and as time went by, probing for discrepancies between what government, their key medical advisors, and other voices in the public domain were advocating as precautionary measures and good practices. Each conference lasted between one and two hours and was broadcast in full on major TV channels.

In between the nightly briefings TV stations ran rolling programmes throughout the day of edited sections, and discussions with studio guests involved in COVID management (M.P.s, academic researchers, and different levels of medical staff). In addition, much use was made of the default option in filling cheap, broadcast time, vox pop interviews on TV and radio with members of the public in hospitals, at home, or on the streets, as well as news footage from around the world.

From the start TV coverage of COVID was visually a horror show with harrowing images from Northern Italy of disruption and collapsing medical infrastructures, showing the sick and dying in hospitals in circumstances that looked near to chaotic. Commentary was of “national emergency”, high mortality and bodies awaiting burial. Once the infection took hold at home the media sought comparable conditions and photo opportunities. Key informants were pressed to predict how great the scale of mortality might be, and one pundit forecast 250,000 dead within a year. For a brief period it sounded as if London hospitals might be overwhelmed and battle-field marquees went up in the City to provide bed spaces for the anticipated overflows of COVID cases. But the hospitals were not overwhelmed, and the marquees disappeared from the screen. Public anxiety was then directed to care homes, where there was a higher than average death rate among the elderly inmates. This became a cause celebre for which the government was blamed for its poor management of a care system it had underfunded. It was partially alleviated when vaccines came on stream and the elderly were given priority treatment. Vaccination itself became a photo fest with repeated shots of needles plunging into arms in newscasts aired around lunch and tea time on the main TV channels.

Government regulations to prevent the spread of infection: social distancing, quarantine and isolation became increasingly criticized among sectors of the population as an unwarranted limitation of personal freedom. The media reinforced this perspective with photo opportunities of frail and bewildered-looking grandparents, staring helplessly down from their windows on daughters, sons and grand-children whom they were not allowed to meet, and of distressed relatives gazing back, tearfully deploring the separation. Though separation from loved ones and deaths of the aged in care-homes were significant, they involved minorities.

TVs repetitive pursuit of worst case footage allowed stations to construct a “war footing” nostalgia harking back to the Second World War that was particularly appealing among older people, the BBC’s major constituency. The difference was that during the War the broadcast coverage was by BBC radio, not multi-channel TV, and involved only a few news broadcasts per day, rather than the rolling, multi-channel occupation of several mainstream news channels—all day and every day.

But not all believed what the media suggested. There was a reality gap for many people in the sample between their view “on the ground”, and the alarmist impressions gained from the media. Very few had witnessed fatalities or serious COVID cases that bore any relation to the horrors abroad—bodies in the streets, mass graves, and dying people gasping for breath outside hospitals without oxygen as in India. Nevertheless, the weight of bad news coverage affected several in the survey who said they had initially been skeptical about the threat posed by COVID, but later became more fearful from the relentless weight of anxiety-inducing broadcast impressions.

5. Mental Health, the Media and COVID

“Mental health issues” had been an emergent, public agenda promoted by a variety of interests and occupational groups for two decades before COVID struck. The groups in their relationship to mainstream medicine, ranging from doctors and clinical psychologists, to life advisors, yoga instructors, well-being promoters, and mindfulness mentors.

The media were at the forefront of occupational groups, giving, manly unexamined currency to mental health, as an elastic concept, served up as both a topic of major concern, and as dream of perfection for readers and viewers. It was vague enough to be applied to almost any form of dysfunctional condition that ranged from clinical, post-traumatic stress; work absenteeism; bullying at school; trolling on social media; betting too heavily; eating too much; kicking the cat.

The elasticity of “mental health” had gradually marginalised an older, more precise concept, that of, “mental illness”. This had been a familiar term, known to refer to a minority in the population whose overt behavior (e.g., violent outbursts, hearing voices, eccentric movements, refusal to speak) indicated dysfunctional disturbance requiring medical attention, and in extreme cases, institutional treatment. It was an observable and treatable condition that some people had, but most did not.

“Mental health” was a vaguer something everybody had to some measurable extent, which was determined not by manifest behaviour, but by self-reported, verbal responses to questions decided and administered by medical officers. This typically involved a personal interview and completing a questionnaire in which subjects rated themselves on a numbered, low-to-high scale of familiar, emotional states in everyday currency, e.g., “anxiety”, “stress” and “happiness”. The scaled results were recorded and then logged as official, patient data revealing the respondents “mental health” profile. No longer was anyone “mentally ill”. Nor was anyone normal. Instead everyone became a registered medical case with a name, number and a score, inaugurating them a subject to the diagnostic and prescriptive opinion and supervision of authorized professionals. It was a system of patient creating that allowed specialists in “mental health” to assert that up to half the population might at some time suffer “mental health issues”.

As the physical risk of COVID diminished the media took up “mental health issues” as a predicted add-on to the physical risks during and after COVID. Empirically the link between mental health and COVID proved hard to support, as one researcher found in reviewing Indian studies that had been conducted to explore the relationship, and concluded that there were few usable ones, and what there were did not suggest negative links of any magnitude [30].

6. Family Life under Travel Contraints and Lockdown

The travel and tourism was the industry most radically affected by COVID conditions. Airlines were grounded. Hotels, restaurants and pubs shut, some never to reopen. All attractions closed their doors. National Tourist Offices and Area Tourist Offices hibernated. There were few places to go and few ways of getting there.

The loss that was felt among the population with no holidays to look forward to, and unable to meet other people. It brought home to many who might have doubted it—among them, government which had rarely given tourism high ministerial priority in Britain -leisure mobilities and time away were no longer seen as seasonal luxuries, but ones of societal entitlement. Getting away had become a calendar rite.

COVID measures were particularly hard on the young. Work places shut down and parents and adult siblings came home to work. Routines and daily schedules changed, and domestic times, spaces and utilities had, to a greater or lesser extent, to be reconfigured. Socially, young children lost the peer group contact of the classroom, the shared rituals of the playground and neighbourhood, spaces that constitute the meet-up, hang-out settings of growing up and the friendships outside class, which happen largely beyond adult observation.

For tertiary students away at colleges and universities, campus life ended and they came home to solitary study. They had a right to feel a sense of grievance on two counts; that their age group was disproportionally affected as one with a high propensity for socializing outside the home, and because it was also the one least likely to be seriously affected by COVID. Restrictions on travel, the closure of pubs and clubs, and abandonment of music festivals led a minority to protest and demonstrate, thus fulfilling the anarchic promptings of the Beastie Boys, a 1980s punk band, “To fight for the right to party!”.

For all families loss of the seasonal mobilities of tourism was resented, but once the prohibitions took hold, most people accepted them. They then began looking for loopholes and ways out.

6.1. The VFR Revival

One way out was VFR tourism. As most of the main forms of tourism—recreational, business, and religious—diminished or closed down, it remained the last one left standing. From being a tourism category marginalised by the industry as worth less in revenues than others, and ignored by most academics, it metamorphosed as a priority a travel form to be fought for and cherished.

For lower income families contacts with relatives and friends was relatively unaffected because they lived closer by and thus involved same day, local trips with few overnight stays. Moreover, for most of the year, meetings out-of-doors were permissible within varying number limits.

It was upper income families who were most likely to make or host VFR trips, and tertiary-educated, young professionals who had moved away from home.

Nevertheless, VFR assumed a new priority for all classes. One reason for this was that it could be pursued for most of the period within the changing government regulations on movement and meetings. The second was that it was a tourism category, co-created between significant others in host and guest roles that needed no commercial intermediaries or service providers offering accommodation, transport and hospitality. All it took was a car or public transport and a welcoming, family member or friend with bedspace.

The result was that visiting friends, and particularly family members, becamehigher on public agendas than it had ever been, and one that, like others during the pandemic, was amplified in the media, hailing family visiting as a precious, human right, threatened by the regulations of insensitive, government bureaucrats. When government introduced quarantine measures that stopped people visiting the elderly in care homes, and limiting in-house contact between family members living apart, the media featured photo opportunities of weeping sons, daughters unable to sit and hold hands with dying relatives, and mourners having to scale down funerals to stay within meeting limits.

The compulsion for VFR travel led some to ignore restrictions on travel outside one’s neighbourhood. The offenders included government figures who had broken laws they had themselves introduced and were “outed” stridently in the media. This had repercussions that helped to bring down the prime minister, Boris Johnson two years later.

6.2. Living with COVID: Adaptations and Adjustments

There were, however, compensations and benefits for many during COVID.

Physical isolation was not what it had been during past pandemics. It was palliated by many ways of staying connected and distracted through modern technology: real time contact by video linking and social media networks on tablets and smart phones; video conferencing at work; uploads of selfies and lifestyle on photo exchange sites; and “old school” messaging by “snail mail” postings. There was also a great variety of in-home, broadcast entertainment to distract and divert on radio, TV, computer and smart phone, offering extensive menus of news, film, sport, music, pornography, and religion, as well as a promoted wonderland of box sets which turned every home into a private. With modern technology at hand, COVID meant for many, that life went on as usual. It was not the Black Death or London Plague with victims and families shut up and dying alone in houses with red crosses on the door, expecting to be carted away in the night to unmarked graves.

Once restricted travel movement became an unavoidable fact of life people developed ways of maintaining mobility within the regulations. A general decision was to abandon the car and, in response to government advice, to cycle and walk more locally. This became possible with work places closed and many people working or unemployed at home. During 2020, cycling and walking increased markedly in England, compared to 2019 [31]. Over the year a national survey showed that miles walked per person increased by 7%, the highest levels since 2002, and walking “stages” of over a mile increased by 26% to 92 stages per person compared with 2019 [31].

The most regular walks took place alone, or with friends and relatives, in spaces near home. People came out to play locally, visiting public parks maintained by councils that had previously had limited visitors, except at weekends. Others took advantage of city wild spaces, and landscaped paths created off, and around, ring roads and new estates throughout England. In Buckingham these encircled the town and included river walks along the Ouse. On Christmas Day 2021 a group of neighbours in the town, unable to meet together indoors, took the short walk to the churchyard and gathered round a bench to meet up. One was very unwell and it was his last trip out with friends. Other church yards and historic cemeteries attracted new visitors. People with allotments worked them more frequently, and sometimes invited friends to sit out with them, and watch the vegetables grow.

Same day excursions to regional beauty spots increased when they could be accessed by a short drive or train journey. From Birmingham there were walks in the Lickey Hills, and day outs at Stratford. The coastal resorts of Tynemouth and Whitley Bay, half an hour from Newcastle-on-Tyne, experienced summer crowds in 2021, hardly seen since the 1970s, when English seaside resorts nose-dived into a thirty year decline.

Seaside resorts in the south filled with family excursionists when regulations allowed them to assemble outdoors, masked up, in rationed numbers. In July and August restaurants with outdoor spaces reopened, and breaks in self-catering accommodation, particularly B and Bs revived briefly. Day trippers by car and train formed packed-out, weekend crowds in seaside resorts at Margate and Whitstable, and in more sedate, heritage towns for Midland ramblers in Buxton and the Peak District. Even on a wet, August weekend in the cathedral town of Salisbury restaurants with social distancing facilities were fully booked.

Another form of connectivity, for relatives and friends separated by longer distances, was to drive out to an agreed, gateway hub between two or more addresses for a get-together. A daughter living in London met up with her father, living in the Midlands, at a midway point on the M40 motorway in a service station where they shared a takeaway meal by the artificial lake behind the forecourt.

Walking gained new recruits for people seeking escape, exercise and general wellness outside the home. Many, not previously great walkers, enjoyed the psychological and physical feel-good benefits that were, for some, to carry over beyond lockdown. 94% surveyed in a national study thought it likely that they would continue to cycle and walk more once travel restrictions were removed (Gov/Walking 2021). Smart phone technology acted as a novel accessory in pedestrian excursions, allowing family members to count their footsteps and measure the distances walked.

Animal companionship and pet ownership among families increased during COVID, particularly that of dogs, a trend that would have amazed previous populations. When plague had broken in London in 1563 and 1603 dogs were seen as public enemies, carriers of infection, and churchwardens charged their parishioners to slaughter and remove more than 300 of them [32]. Four hundred years later dog ownership during COVID peaked, along with the prices paid for them. In 2021 33% of households chose to own a dog compared with 22% in 2020/2021 [33]. Pet ownership totalled 17 million households with 3.2 million dogs (BBC). Dogs and their owners multiplied in parks and green spaces along river banks, canal tow paths and lake sides. Waterways round Oxford, Birmingham and along the Thames out of London at Marlow and Cookham, became dog shows starring many canine breeds, as well as fashion opportunities for their owners. The media reported the dog boom as surrogate companionship and 74% of people in a survey by the RSPCA said dog ownership had helped their mental life (RSPCA). It could also be a friend-extension measure allowing people to become acquainted. One woman, smiling in the mischief of her senior years, said she looked out for male dog walkers she, “liked the look of”, claiming she could always “get off with them” through doggie exchanges. “Mine’s a shameless bitch!” she laughed looking down at her low slung dachshund. “And so am I!”

A different kind of improvised connection between people, running counter to the isolation COVID was often said to induce, was that of leaving gifts on the steps of neighbours. The gifts were mainly food, targeted at old people living alone. This was an issue the media had promoted. In Emsworth one old pub regular, who had taken to sitting alone in the garden of his local received a birthday cake, and an invitation to Christmas dinner from a neighbour. In other places eggs, jams, cakes and allotment produce appeared on pensioners’ door steps.

Variants of visual contact were filtered exchanges that included: mimed well-wishes to loved ones through hospital glass; waving from the road to those isolating at home, but visible at their windows; and passing messages by greetings cards or letters, and gift parcels over garden walls.

6.3. Significant Silences: Some under-Reported Positive Effects

COVID was not an ill wind that blew nobody any good, though the worst-case stories in the media often suggested this. The most alarming mortality figures were among the old, as had been expected. What had not been expected was that, within this age group it would be those in care homes, who would form a disproportionate number of the elderly victims. The media made much of this bias along with politicians, but not all care homes were affected. One with more than 60 residents in the South had no COVID fatalities during the year. The zero mortality was down to the manager’s decision not to employ part-time, agency nurses because their daily travels round different homes made them prone to pick up and pass on infections. His permanent staff were subject to regular, precautionary testing to minimise the possibility of their becoming carriers.

The assumption that the old were all under particular threat also needed qualification. There were many retired, middle-class couples and individuals in their 70s and 80s, living comfortably on pensions or savings. Those who lived in suburban areas in houses with good sized rooms, and garden spaces were able to avoid contact with those less fortunate. There was a higher than average infection rate among younger, poorer people, often minority groups from immigrant backgrounds living in crowded, multi-occupancy accommodation. Many of them carried on working away from home in low paid, service sectors where they were exposed to daily contact with potential carriers. A study suggested that in the most deprived fifth of Britain there were 35% more deaths and 45% more years of health lost [34].

Another dominant theme in the media was the pathos of old people’s separation from their relatives. Not all older people agreed. There were some who reported that not visiting or receiving relatives was a welcome break. It included long-suffering parents and grandparents who regularly baby-sat for working sons and daughters. One grandfather joked at getting “time off”. Others were secretly relieved not to have to make regular duty calls and extend obligatory invitations to critical parents-in-law, cantankerous aunts and uncles, and layabout sons and daughters. These opinions went unheard, perhaps, not because of media censorship, but because people were reluctant to make them on camera or at the microphome whence word might get back.

For some COVID was a welcome income stream. Furlough payments by the government could be 80% of normal wages to stay home—with or without work. This was a windfall for members of the “precariat”, people with irregular and variable earnings. It included gig economy employees on limited hour contracts, seasonal workers, freelance entrepreneurs in the culture and the performance arts, and casual workers claiming regular/permanent employment status. In the Midlands there were some who had initially isolated, fearing the contagion “out there”, but who recovered courage to go out once furlough payments came on stream and took take day excursions or weekend-breaks away in the summer. After lockdown ended a group of London social workers gathered for a reunion, and looked back on the period of furloughed home time as a peak experience in their pressurized lives.

Pubs, clubs and restaurants were most heavily hit by social distancing and lockdown. Many businesses met this with enterprise and investment, rearranging the social geography inside restaurants or pubs to afford social distancing; or by erecting marquee shelters outside in order to create spaces to compensate for the loss inside. Some found the extensions profitable and retained them when social distancing ended, a happy instance of the unanticipated consequences of history.

7. Pandemics: Family Travel, COVID and the Social Scientist

In the first century A.D. Plutarch, an influential advisor on the good life to the Romans, addressed the recurrent problem of plague which he called “pestilence”, beginning with a definition that categorized it as one among other “Epidemial” diseases that were:

“… occasioned in some common cause and therefore spread, and take hold of all persons indifferently in a tract or city” (, [35], italics supplied, no pagination)

The use of the word “indifferently” in this definition is interesting in relation to COVID. In this seventeenth century indifference did not mean something not to care about, but something assumed to affect all equally. Pestilences were, according to Plutarch, outbreaks that were even-handed in their victims within a population. The well-known ones in history, the Black Death and Spanish flu, have been popularly remembered like this, as catastrophic infections that spread mortality throughout the whole population. Plutarch regarded even-handedness as a useful hypothetical start point in evaluating other developments in society, including the workings of government, and gave the procedure the definitional name of “Isonomie” characterized as:

“… an aequability of government under the same laws, indifferently ministred to all persons: as also an aequality of right which all men do enjoy in one state” (Plutarch 1603, no pagination)

We do not know whether the pestilences Plutarch had in mind did evince this isonomic even-handedness of effects, but we do know that COVID did not. It was not “indifferent” in its victims socially, physically or geographically. It struck down some more than others, and its after-effects and consequences varied among them. Thus the hypothesis of isonomie, though not confirmed in this instance, can be seen as a useful concept in examining pandemic effects. Conformity and departure from the isonomic expectations can be further exemplified in comparing COVID’s impacts sociologically anthropologically.

7.1. Isonomie and the Sociology of Pandemics

In sociological terms the media narrative of the year’s battle with pandemic was strongly isonomic for much of the time. Its imaginary was that of one nation “up against it” with all sharing and bearing up under travel restrictions and lockdown. References to the war were, as we have seen, invoked in media agendas, especially by the BBC. A pervasive instance of this was the weight of media time invested in “Colonel Tom”, a former army officer in his 100th year who became a patriotic mascot for his efforts in raising £30 million for charity by walking 100 laps of his garden. It was a remarkable achievement, but what turned it into an iconic national event was the narrative framing and photo-opportunities representing him as a be-medalled, old soldier and family patriarch, who emblematically embodied the “Dunkirk spirit”, symbolising the isonomic unity of a nation at war with COVID.

In travel and tourism terms there were a number of socio-demographic variations from the isonomic premise. VFR propensity was, as discussed earlier, less among, poorer, lower-income, working families. They travelled less, because more likely to have family and friends nearby, especially ethnic ones, a pattern observable among Afro-Asian communities in the North, the Midlands, and in some areas of London. Secondly, lower income families were less likely to make or host visits due to limited room space at home. It was higher-income, professional families and their younger, educated sons and daughters, often living far away from their families, who were regular, repeat VFR travellers most likely to feel the loss when travel was shut down. They included students stranded in lodgings and family members abroad, unable to get back home.

Once restrictions were fully in place, open air escape and social distancing at home were not the same for everybody. Those who lived in multi-occupational spaces of small, urban houses and high-rise flats were less able to distance themselves from other people. These were typically the conditions of poorer, low-paid workers, including ethnic groups, many employed in the National Health Service, working long hours in hospitals and care homes, which put them at greater risk of infection, as well as making time off for exercise and walking limited. This class situation was reflected in official data reporting that populations in the deprived fifth of England experienced 35% more deaths and 45% more years than those in more affluent parts [34].

The National Health Service (NHS) and its employees was at first represented in isonomic terms. The media narrative was of a great, egalitarian British institution, staffed by dedicated workers, offering medical care, free at the point-of-use, for all the people during the pandemic. This isonomic vision was promoted in a campaign, encouraging British people to engage in nightly rituals of clapping in windows and doorways at home, in acclamation of the NHS. Members of parliament joined in signaling their solidarity with consensual feeling.

This imaging was later dented by less positive media coverage of inequities in the occupational life spaces of those involved with the NHS. It exposed the low-paid and long hours worked by nurses and their less visible cohorts “behind the scenes”—cleaners, porters, kitchen staff, drivers, rubbish collectors, etc. In contrast the spotlight swung to well-paid managers in the Health Trusts, highly paid management consultants engaged by government, and pharmaceutical companies doing unprecedented business from vaccines and face masks. This modified news agenda was taken up by opposition members of parliament, and government critics denouncing how, for ten years, the government had held down pay levels in nursing, cut funding for social care, and passed laws making the NHS vulnerable to US-style privatization.

Isonomic inequity became an un-named, but potent flash point when it was discovered that, as discussed earlier, there were government employees, who had ignored travel bans, social distancing and lockdowns, which they had designed and voted into law binding the nation.

7.2. Isonomie, VFR Tourism and the Anthropology of Pandemics

If COVID’s progress reflected non-isonomic inequities sociologically, its family effects were more even-handed in anthropological terms. In anthropology human development is conceived as a life cycle of sequenced, status passages from childhood to adulthood that are typically marked off and celebrated in publicly performed rituals, two being “initiation rites” and “rites of passage” [36,37]. The rituals mark important, first-time arrival and occupancy of a traditional status position (e.g., coming-of-age parties, first communion for Catholics), or the passage through, or ending of, a status position (a divorce, a retirement party). Rituals also mark off calendar movements through the year (Christmas, Ramadan, summer holidays, the New Year), and the week (viz. weekend vs. weekday behavior). Many involve travelling long distances and elaborate hospitality provision.

It was these central pillars of life passage for the whole population that were affected by the restrictions on travel and assembly during COVID. They led to the cancellations or postponement of weddings, coming-of-age parties, and rationed numbers at many kinds of celebration. Funerals were particularly affected. Unlike weddings, birthday parties and baptisms they could not be indefinitely delayed. They continued to take place with reduced numbers of mourners limited at different times to 20 or fewer people, who had to sit, socially distanced in small groups, within large churches or crematorium spaces. Services were timed, not to exceed 30 min, which meant short sermons, brief readings, and limited musical participation. Funeral companies tried to compensate for small attendances, by arranging film coverage that could be simultaneously beamed to larger audiences at home via Zoom, a new word that circulated into familiarity as virtual connection for people who could not meet up in person. For many these arrangements seemed a profanation of the sacred rituals due to the dead. They imposed clock-watch disciplines, and controlled entry limits from the quotidian world, on a cultural occasion traditionally enacted in a space where relatives and friends could freely meet, and make their unhurried final farewells.

COVID also inhibited or ended everyday cultural movement associated with work and leisure. These comprised the many, brief journeys that sustain everyday domestic life at home, work and play, as well as the high-note ones of special occasions and tourism. It was recognition of the number and significance of the mobilities on which society depended that COVID restrictions brought to public attention as the underlying fabric of modern living. It was like fishes discovering they were surrounded by water in a pond that suddenly seemed to be emptying.

8. The Results

Methodological

This was a small, improvised study, put together at short notice under several constraints to track the impact of an unprecedented pandemic on national behavior as it happened. The study may be questioned on several counts. One may be the hubris of seeking to offer a state-of-the-nation appraisal of life under COVID using a hybrid, mixed-methodology survey with several obvious limitations namely: the small convenience sample of initial respondent-informants; the arbitrary bias in their selection from personal networks; the opportunistic choice of locations; the ad hoc “snowballing” recruitment of informants who were not only questioned about their own experiences, but briefed to act as recruiters of, and reporters on, other respondent-informants in their regions.

All these limitations were recognized from the start but the study went ahead for two reasons. The first was the opportunity to attempt some kind of real time account of national behavior during a historic event, despite the restrictions on time, movement and association which ruled out a more rigorous study

Secondly, it was an exploratory study that was not intended to deliver up a complete picture (whatever that might have meant) in research terms but, like qualitative research precedents set by Mass Observation, Grounded Study advocates, and academic bricolleurs, to generate insights into a moment in national life, that might be of use in the future.

Accordingly the summarized results are presented in tabular form (

Table 1. Study Results.

Research Findings	Illustrative Policy Outcomes
Finding 1: The modest scale of COVID as fatal infection compared with historical instances.	Use and promotion of historical data to contextualize pandemic development in relation to precedents.
Finding 2: The social-economic damage and societal disruption inflicted, not by infection, but governmental control/coping measures which particularly affected the hospitality and tourism industries.	Early and continuing consultation required with industry stakeholders in developing future pandemic control measures.
Finding 3: The unprecedented weight of media coverage on scale/severity of COVID risk that many never saw. The gap between personal experience and media reality divided opinion, creating anxiety for some, and scepticism for others.	Need for more proportionate balance of media coverage of pandemics, e.g., in frequency/length of official media briefings; and in the levels of repetitive, all-day, rolling, news, with alarmist content.
Finding 4: Media/Medical expert prediction of “mental health” effects to follow COVID, with Anxiety as symptomatic condition. This replaced the traditional notion of anxieties, in the plural, as normal, occasional states everyone experiences.	Need for more transparent, evidential support for, and scrutiny of unproven “expert” opinion tending to “medicalise” common mental/emotional states such as “anxiety” as patient-creating pathologies, during pandemics.
Finding 5: The variations in susceptibility to COVID among different population groups by age and social status, and differences in awareness and attitudes among families. Highest risk group was were older people, but many enjoyed life on pensions in conditions of comfort.	Need to profile the most vulnerable earlier and prioritise measures for them, but allow latitudes of exemption to less affected groups. Pandemic management requires public opinion monitoring tracking variations among different groups.
Finding 6: The positive but under-reported, features enjoyed by many under changed conditions of work and government subsidy (e.g., furlough payments and working from home).	A more proportionate balance between positive and negative desirable from Press and TV, though there was some coverage of things to do, new things to try(e.g., walking for health.
Finding 7: COVID revealed tourism as a major, social priority. Opposition to bans on travel and holidays showed tourism now seen as entitled right, rather than optional luxury.	Finding 7 combined with 2 above, shows that both supply and demand of travel and hospitality need priority consideration and protection in pandemics.
Finding 8: Visiting Friends and Relatives, the tourism forms least affected by COVID, and continued to thrive.	The importance of VFR suggests that governments should protect opportunities for family contacts to maximum.
Finding 9: The variety of ways in which families maintained contact including, Visiting with Friends and Relatives (WFR) out of home at indoor and outdoor, public locations.	The manifested resource and improvisation invested in VFR and family travel merits wider behavioural research by social scientists, augmenting the limited commercial attention it has had among tourism professionals as low value tourism
Finding 10: The utility of Isonomie as an analytical hypothesis in pandemic study, e.g., in comparing the sociological and anthropological impacts of COVID.	Isonomie also relevant in other domains of analysis involving public welfare and governmental measures targeted at, and assumed/intended to affect all equally.

: Study Results) in two columns.

Column 1 summarises the “Research Findings”.

Column 2 suggests an “Illustrative Policy Outcome”, exemplifying how each finding might affect policy

9. Discussion

The findings provide the basis for identifying some potential insights into national life under COVID-19, which this exploratory study was intended to generate. Though itemised as discrete findings, interactions between them may be observed.

The first was that, compared with the pandemics of the past, COVID’s effects as fatal infection were minor, but that the measures taken to control it produced major, disruptive social and economic effects, never observed during previous pandemics. 2020 was the first time a separation between the disease and its societal treatment became a contentious public issue. Many people believed that COVID was not a serious infection, and had little personal evidence later for thinking it was. This led to divided opinion in the country on the dimensions of the infection, and the legitimacy of the governmental measures imposed to control it.

The implication for future pandemic management is that, in addition to disease prenvention and treatment, more attention needs to be given to the unaffected, healthy majority in the working economy which provides the employees and customers of industries that were diastrously affected. This includes monitoring public opinion and behaviour throughout to assess morale, variations in susceptibility to infection, and taking actions that exempt the least susceptible from constraints of movement and assembly that protect the most vulnerable.

The other pervasive condition that affected everyone was the unprecedented weight and impact of media coverage in print, broadcasting and digital form during COVID. The media were an ever-present, elephant-in-the-corner that shaped perceptions of COVID’s scale, severity and effects with images that were, at times alarmist, and progressively affected even those who had no first-hand reason to be alarmed. In addition to their discursive emphasis on the most negative and emotive aspects of the pandemic as infection, the media promoted “mental health issues” as a separate shiboleth during, and in the predicted aftermath of, COVID. During COVID the mental health issues involved anxieties (in the plural) of studying at home, separation from school friends, work at home, holiday deprivation, claustrophobia of not getting out, etc. etc. After COVID went away the media prophesised the possibility of continuing mental health issues due to a condition known as “Anxiety” (in the singular) left by the hangover of COVID conditions. The move from plural to singular was a small step for language, but a giant step in consumer. ”Anxieties” were temporary setbacks that could be managed without medical support; “Anxiety” was a condition requiring the medical cavalry.

In the future all pandemics in western societies will be media pandemics, unless as in a nuclear attack, the effects are so devastating they no longer operate. Until that happens media role and output needs rethinking in time and content. Without the media large number of English people would have known little of COVID. Their impact was huge and one never admitted or examined. If governments ever have to deal with a new COVID there are reasons for them to reconsider the number of repetitive Question and Answer media briefings and shorten those retained.

For tourism the impacts of COVID were a mixture of collapse and unexpected resilience. Bans and lockdown ended foreign travel, closed down attractions, and ended hospitality organisations unable to offer social distancing and/or outdoor services. VFR and WFR tourism survived after the other main forms were gone, partly because they required no service support except transport to accommodation, provided by loved ones and friends, rather than industry. The varied ways in which visits were defended and maintained by families and friends revealed an embedded significance, often overlooked by tourism professionals concerned with the commercial yield of VFR and WFR. Despite being the poor relation of the tourism industry, family tourism emerged as a formidable human priority, consecrated in some news coverage when it was prevented, as sort of sacred pilgrimage. This renaissance makes it worth research that goes beyond managerial surveys, tracking bottom-line visitor numbers, profiles and expenditures. There were hints of many unexamined, experiential aspects of VFR in this study relating to: its varied occasions and activities; the co-created features of VFR trips; the intra-family politics during visits (e.g., between children and adults); the cultural variations of VFR choices in time and place (dog walking along the Thames at Marlow vs. eating motorway food in open spaces by relatives unable to so so in home); and the contradictary feelings and attitudes associated with VFR trips (e.g., desire and dread of visiting and hosting). Plutarch’s isonomic premise of equal participation and effect might be a revealing startpoint for exploring some of these.