When the World Shut Down Around Us: travel restrictions and impact on family life during the Covid years.

Derek Bryce offers a personal account of the human impact of travel restrictions, and cautions against restrictions on both our right to travel to be with loved ones and on our leisure mobility.

The impediments to mobility associated with the emergence of Covid-19 took various forms but were unified by their hitherto unthinkable nature, particularly in those societies where freedom of movement was thought of as an uncontested right. The negative economic impact on the travel and tourism industry, and the economies and communities that depend or draw upon them, was both predictable and predicted. Airlines parked much of their fleets at great expense; hotel occupancy rates plummeted; the number of people employed in travel and tourism declined sharply, particularly in younger age groups (ONS, 2023). The socio-cultural impact, on which I’ll focus in this piece, was of such a scale that societies are only now beginning to come to terms with them - a process made more difficult by the complicity of governments at city, regional and national levels in drawing up and enforcing fear-based restrictions developed by academics working in the fields like behavioural psychology (Dodsworth, 2021).

Our political and public health gamekeepers became poachers of our lives and liberties. It would be a sweet naif indeed who would take on trust pledges of many of our political representatives (with a few honourable exceptions) to mount a transparent self-examination of restrictions that ruined the lives of millions with no discernible positive medical or social outcomes (The Telegraph, 2023). No-lockdown Sweden is the case that should shame almost every other society which chose instead to follow a template laid down in totalitarian China.

I will not dwell on the above, which is emerging fitfully in a growing body of evidence that should damn the political, public health, academic and media classes responsible for drawing up, implementing and enabling these restrictions as well as those in the general public who were complicit in their neighbours’ oppression long after countervailing evidence became available. Instead, I will offer a highly personal account of how they impacted me and my family. I do not do so to position mine as a singular case deserving of particular sympathy, for it is but once case of unnecessary suffering amongst untold millions the world over. What follows is merely my testimonial, all views are my own and I will hang my story around the various barriers to our movement, international and domestic, that emerged during that dreadful time.

My first inkling that we were dealing with an emerging social panic with unprecedented consequences emerged in early March 2020. During that time, I took a long anticipated and much-planned holiday to Ethiopia to gaze upon its many cultural wonders.

Manchester Airport seemed unusually quiet, and I spotted one or two fellow passengers wearing facemasks. Upon landing in Addis Ababa, Africa’s largest air hub, all passengers were subject to a health interview and passengers arriving from flights from China were under particular scrutiny. I thought little more of it as I travelled around the country until I got to the city of Lalibela where a group of young local men who, seeing me coming, crossed to the other side of the street shouting at me, ‘we don’t want to get coronavirus!’. The paranoia and heightened fear of people from outside one’s locality had already begun to take root as it soon would in the countries I call home: the United Kingdom and Canada.

Things were about to veer from the abstract to the surreal and the deeply personal.

Roughly two weeks after my return, the first UK-wide lockdown commenced on 26^th March. Shortly before this, my long-term partner, who doesn’t live with me, had come down from his home in another part of Scotland for one of his regular visits. As we watched panic build, I recall saying to him that if what I thought might happened imminently, it might be a few weeks before we were able to be together again.

The unthinkable happened and we were not to be together again until late June. Matt Hancock, the UK Health Secretary, was asked about how people like us, in long-term relationships but who, for various reasons, live apart, might respond to the lockdown rules forbidding people to travel outside a defined radius of their homes. Mr. Hancock instructed us in peremptory terms, with a shrug and a smile, to make a choice – move in together or stay apart - with no apparent awareness of the reasons for and complexities surrounding decisions such as ours.

My partner has a physically demanding job which is local to his area and doesn’t allow him the privilege of remote-working enjoyed by members of the pyjama, laptop and sourdough bread-baking class of which I am a reluctant member. Like many, in the early stages of the lockdown, we were unsure of the severity of the virus, so we complied. During the ensuing months of forced separation, he told me that because the bus service had been so reduced in his area because of Covid-19 restrictions, he often had to walk forty minutes along rural roads to and from work for early shifts (neither of us drive).

He related how one kind colleague offered him a discreet lift in until one of the many neighbourhood and workplace sneaks, with whom we regrettably became familiar, spotted and reported them – car-pooling against the new rules, you see (I’ll return to the effects of members of the public spying on one another at government behest later in this piece). This continued until June when non-cohabiting partners were ‘granted’ the concession of being allowed to meet outdoors. Our regular visits – hugs allowed now! – recommenced shortly thereafter. At one stage, so enveloped in despair was he, that he wondered if people would ever be allowed to hug again. That broke my heart. Knowing what we know now, neither of us would comply with such cruel and risible rules today.

When the UK and Scottish governments reimposed a lockdown in October, 2020, the fear narrative, to which he was still susceptible to (I’d long since pegged it as a boondoggle) re-emerged and at one stage I had to plead with him and show him the relevant passages in ‘the rules’ to convince him we wouldn’t be arrested if we travelled to see one another. If nothing else, these oppressive restrictions allowed us to learn things about those we are the closest to. In my case it was to learn the harmful effects of fear-driven government propaganda on an already nervous man.      

I had been booked to attend a conference in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), Canada in May 2020. My mother, brothers and their families all live in BC and neighbouring Alberta and I’d planned to stay on to visit them. By April 2020, British Airways had cancelled my flights and the conference had been postponed. I accepted this and, at the time, still thought things would revert to normal by the summer. This was not to be, and events intervened making those restrictions all the more acute.

During the very early stages of Covid-19, my mother’s partner began to show rapid, progressive deterioration in both cognitive and physical ability. He was 82 and so such things are not entirely unexpected but they discovered to their distress that their GP would not see them in person, only accepting phone or online consultations and that their local hospital was not accepting ‘non-emergency’ CT scans because the health care system in Canada, as in the UK, had quickly been transformed into a Covid-19 priority service. Over ten phone consultations over the next three months, in mounting desperation, he was first undiagnosed then misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s disease until he collapsed one day in May 2020.

My mother phoned the hospital directly, pleading with them to send an ambulance. This time they did. He was taken in to hospital and given the CT scan he would have received months before pre-Covid-19. The hospital called the next day to be informed that they had found an advanced and aggressive brain tumour and that he had only a month or two at most left to live. He was released into my mother’s care, with support now provided, and two weeks later his life was ended using Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying law (MAID) which had been his wish in such an event.

My mother lay with him in her arms as he slipped away. She maintains that, while it seems likely his cancer was too advanced to treat even had he been seen in March, that the quality of life this very finest of men was entitled to in his final weeks and months was denied to him because, by then, Covid seemed to be the only disease health authorities took seriously. This, the very finest of men, was effectively abandoned by a healthcare system that he had paid into all his adult life. I helped my mother to draft a letter to her political representatives and the head of public health in BC in which we went through attempt after attempt to receive assistance for him. It reads like a Kafkaesque tale of gradually mounting horror. Not all of them deigned to reply and there wasn’t a hint of apology from those that did.    

The Canadian government had, in the meantime, imposed a two-week quarantine on all inbound Canadian travellers and halted nearly all foreign passport holders’ entry. I hold both UK and Canadian passports but the sheer cost and uncertainty of being detained at a location of the Canadian government’s pleasure for two weeks, alongside the paucity of flights, made it impractical for me to travel to Canada to support my mother at such a difficult time, and too late when the worst news was confirmed.

My brother in Alberta was not permitted to drive across the provincial border because of rolling domestic travel restrictions. Fortunately, I have another brother who lives in BC who came to support mum and took her back to be with him, his wife and her grandchildren when it was over – breaking some rules, no doubt. I applaud them for this. Over the next few months of talking to mum on video chat, I heard her express no hope in ever seeing me in person again. That was another heart breaking episode.

A glimmer of hope in October 2020! The government of Alberta had announced a pilot scheme wherein inbound Canadian travellers could bypass the usual two week quarantine by flying into Calgary and testing negative for Covid both before travel and on arrival. Restrictions on domestic flights had been eased too so I spoke to my family and we put a plan together to allow me to travel to Canada to spend Christmas with them. KLM were maintaining flights to Calgary so I booked an international and domestic tickets. My hopes were dashed when the government of BC began to reimpose restrictions on visitation to private homes. Domestic flights began to be cancelled.

My mother was clearly torn between wanting to see me and nervousness about the reception by her small-town neighbours to an out of country visitor. By now, visits by people from outside the home other than grandparents had been disallowed. My brother in BC expressed fears about his neighbour, who works for the health authorities, reporting him to the police for breaking the rules if I came over. So, my own family essentially told me not to come at Christmas. These were the societal effects of governments encouraging neighbour to spy on and report on neighbour.

These are not the societies most Canadian and British citizens would have recognised only a few months before. Shortly thereafter, the UK government imposed ruinously expensive hotel quarantine. Perhaps I would have been amongst those who cabinet ministers and civil servants laughed at for being caught out by that hellish scheme (Telegraph, 2023).

In August 2021, Justin Trudeau’s government finally lifted hotel quarantine requirements for returning Canadian citizens who tested negative. I was on one of the first flights into Canada after this and was finally reunited with my dear mother and the rest of my family after a year and a half of enforced separation.

This is but one story of the effects of barriers to travel, intersecting with other, in my view unnecessary, Covid-19 restrictions had on people’s romantic and family lives. Many may sympathise with those rules and perhaps say, ‘well, in retrospect. family visits should have been allowed but no travel for those frivolous sun-seeking leisure holiday-makers!’. I don’t see the distinction. Freedom of movement should be non-negotiable in societies such as ours except in the direst of circumstances. This was not one of those.

It is my contention, and emerging evidence is bearing me out, that Covid-19 did not even approach such an emergency. I will neither forgive nor forget what was done to, not for citizens of allegedly free, democratic societies during those dark years. My trust in the integrity of governments and public health bodies has been trashed in the process and I emerged from the Covid years with a heightened level of distrust and cynicism. To Hell with the lot of them.

Dodsworth, L. (2021). A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic. Pinter & Martin.: London

Office of National Statistics (2023). Coronavirus and the impact on the UK travel and tourism industry. Available at:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/tourismindustry/articles/coronavirusandtheimpactontheuktravelandtourismindustry/2021-02-15 Accessed: 3rd April, 2023.

The Telegraph. (2023) The Lockdown Files. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/lockdown-files/ Accessed: 3^rd April, 2023

Dr Derek Bryce lectures and researches at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.