How much did the Covid crisis cost?

The true cost of Covid cannot be quantified only in death rates or GDP figures. Though it could have been far worse, the pandemic nonetheless inflicted a deeper wound on our society than any productivity calculus can measure.

But as legal domestic restrictions end, and the economic fallout from months of stringent controls is increasingly felt by households, it’s worth exploring how the nation’s balance sheet could have looked had this virus never appeared.

It was former US Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen who observed, ‘a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,’ but the extent of public sector spending over the course of this pandemic has blown his figures out of the water: current estimates range from £315 billion to £410 billion, equivalent to between £4,700 to £6,100 per person in the UK.

At one point, the government was borrowing around £37 million every single hour.