How did lockdown impact children?

More or Less: Behind the Stats

BBC

Business, Mathematics, Science, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In March 2020, the covid pandemic forced the UK into lockdown. Schools closed, universities went online and the economy shut down.

It slowly became clear that young people were not falling victim to the virus in significant numbers - they made up a fraction of a percent of the overall death toll.

But their lives were radically changed - most spending these formative ages stuck at home as the pandemic raged. Politicians and academics worried about the long term impact this would have on their chances in life.

Five years on, Tim Harford delves into the data to try to work out what we can say with confidence about the effect of the lockdown on the children and young adults who lived through it.

On questions of education levels, job prospects and mental health, what story does the best evidence show us?

Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Nigel Appleton Editor: Richard Vadon

Transcript

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0:00.0	Did you know that you can listen to many of your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds?
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0:23.8	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:28.2	Hello and welcome to a special edition of More or Less.
0:31.9	With me, Tim Harford, it's five years almost to the day that the Prime Minister announced
0:36.9	that UK schools would
0:38.5	be closed to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. We're going to devote this extended
0:44.1	episode to explaining what we know and what we don't about the effect of the COVID lockdowns
0:49.1	on young people.
1:04.8	In the early stages of the first lockdown, it wasn't entirely clear how young people themselves were going to be hit by the virus.
1:09.6	But it turned out that they would be spared from the worst impacts of the disease. Here's Alastair Monroe, a doctor and lecturer in pediatric infectious diseases at the University
1:16.3	of Southampton.
1:18.1	COVID itself actually had a relatively small clinical impact on young people.
1:24.2	In terms of what we saw from respiratory infections, it wasn't anything that would
1:29.8	seem unusual compared to normal respiratory viral infections in children. For a few young people,
1:36.7	COVID was a very serious disease. Long COVID has also been a problem for some, and young people
1:43.0	did die. But almost always children with
1:46.2	pre-existing conditions that made them very vulnerable. The total number of children who died
1:51.6	was in the tens, not the tens of thousands. So, in general terms, COVID wasn't a particularly
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