Britons among hardest hit by Covid fallout five years on

Slower bounceback despite higher spending. Failure to recover is 'damning indictment'

- James Tapper

Britain performed worse than most other developed nations in its response to the Covid pandemic, according to an Observer analysis of international data, five years on from the first lockdown.

The UK spent more money than most other countries on economic help yet still ended up with larger drops in life expectancy, more people too sick to work, huge levels of home-lessness and soaring mental health problems among young people.

Thousands will gather around the UK today to mark the fifth anniversary of the pandemic, yet the effects of Covid are not over and continue to affect the poorest more than others, health and civil society leaders warned.

"We haven't seen the bounceback that other countries have," said Siva Anandaciva, director of policy at the King's Fund thinktank.

"When I look at the one big global indicator of how healthy we are, which is our life expectancy, we've gone backwards.

"We've fallen back to levels of a decade ago, while other countries have kept motoring on in western Europe and leaving us behind. It's a pretty damning indictment of what happened."

Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy, said inequality was "the primary story of the pandemic".

"You still find that people from poorer backgrounds are more likely to have been impacted," Shah said, adding that the rate of long Covid in the most deprived households is double that of the most wealthy.

"One of the dreadful things about the pandemic was that, as a sideeffect, there was less money to invest in public services across the piece.