So why the hell are so many people still losing their minds over it? I don’t just mean the Covid-denying ‘smiley’ contingent, who adopted the Acid House logo as their emblem last autumn. They went crazy a long time ago. With the chances of another lockdown dropping close to zero, these erstwhile ‘lockdown sceptics’ went full anti-vax and now scour the internet for sudden cardiac deaths of athletes and the unexpected death of anybody under the age of 60, whispering darkly about the ‘clot shot’. I’ve written enough about these lost souls, but they are not the only fanatics entrenched in an extreme position.

Their opposite number, the Zero Covidians – or ‘frownies’ – have shown no contrition for being wrong on an epic scale since they described England’s ‘Freedom Day’ as a ‘dangerous and unethical experiment’ in July. The prospect of 100,000 cases a day was, in their view, nailed on and there was a real possibility of this rising to 200,000. Independent SAGE called on the government to revert to step two of the roadmap in which socialising indoors with anyone from outside your household was banned.

In the event, the number of cases per day peaked at just over 50,000 shortly before all restrictions were lifted. By the end of July they had fallen by half. Over the next two months rates rose and dipped in the manner of an endemic virus. Both smileys and frownies looked at the data, noted that things looked worse than they did at the same time last summer, when Covid rates were very low, and warned that winter was coming.

All it took was a mini-surge in October for tension to turn into hysteria again. On 20 October, NHS Confederation chief executive Matthew Taylor – who had warned in July that ‘dropping the requirements to wear masks and to socially distance… could lead to further mutations of the virus’ – called for measures, such as working from home and a mask mandate, to be reintroduced. He did this in a press release that began with the veiled threat that ‘[n]o one wants another national lockdown…’. Independent SAGE, the British Medical Association, various trade unions and every social-media user with #ToryGenocide, #JohnsonVariant or #FBPE in their profile joined the call for restrictions to be re-imposed. Britain was a rainy plague island, they said. The least we could do was take our lead from enlightened Europe where the virus was under control thanks to face masks and vaccine passports, they said.

No sooner had Labour leader Keir Starmer put his weight behind this campaign than it began to crumble. The infection rate peaked on 18 October before dropping back to levels last seen in August. As Eastern Europe suffered its worst outbreak yet, the calls to be more European became calls to be more like Western Europe and then to be more like the largest countries in Western Europe. With cases now on the turn in France and shooting up in Germany, Europe will soon be forgotten altogether. Britain currently has a lower reproduction (R) rate than any EU member state (except Romania). It is one of only five countries between Russia and Iceland where rates have been falling.

Needing a coping mechanism when the infection rate falls by a third is not healthy behaviour, psychologically speaking. But when cases began tumbling last month there was a tangible sense of disappointment from the #BorisTheButcher community. They insisted that it was nothing more than a temporary blip caused by the half-term school holidays – this despite the drop starting at least a week before the vast majority of schools broke up and despite that half-terms have never had such an impact on overall case numbers in the past. ‘Give it two weeks’, they said, as they so often do. When cases were still falling in November, they started a weird argument about when half-term was, as if the national infection rate hinged on a few private schools, the Isle of Wight and some factory towns in Leicestershire.

Much of the media dealt with the upturn in Britain’s fortunes in a much simpler way. They ignored it. In more than a few instances, they explicitly claimed that cases were still rising. Interviewing Boris Johnson on 2 November, two weeks after cases peaked, CNN’s lead anchor, Christiane Amanpour, asserted that ‘there’s a big spike in Covid in this country and the record here is worse than it is elsewhere in Europe’. The following day, deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam was asked in a BBC interview: ‘Why are schools not putting masks in place, with cases rising in school-age children?’ And Sky News tweeted: ‘With the UK’s coronavirus epidemic escalating by the day, it’s no longer a case of if Plan B will be triggered but when, say experts.’

Everyone knows the media prefer bad news to good news, but there was something almost pathological about this refusal to look the facts in the face. Could it be sheer ignorance?

On 9 November, the Evening Standard reported: ‘UK Covid deaths soar to 262.’ And the Sun ran the headline: ‘UK daily Covid deaths hit 262 in highest rise in a WEEK.’ It was a Tuesday. Anyone with even a passing interest in the statistics knows that the NHS always reports fewer deaths over the weekend and then catches up with the backlog on Tuesday. It is therefore almost inevitable that the ‘highest rise in a week’ will be seen on a Tuesday and that the figure will appear to ‘soar’ if you compare it to a Monday (which is what the Evening Standard did). When compared to the previous Tuesday, however, the number of deaths had actually fallen.

Whether the result of mendacity or stupidity, the media’s eagerness to maintain a state of panic was almost enough to make you believe in conspiracy theories. For those who already believed in conspiracy theories, it was all the confirmation they needed.