"We are all disaster survivors now"

There's something jarring about people talking about COVID-19 in the past tense. "COVID times" are actually ongoing - not only because variants of the virus are still doing the rounds and the debilitating effects of long COVID are endured by many, but also because the wider social, economic, political and psychological impacts of the pandemic will be felt for decades.

Those impacts are perhaps most concerning with respect to children, as this recent Guardian article underlines. For some people, lockdown may have been about bingeing boxsets and baking banana bread - but for the young, it has caused enormous damage, the scale of which is only likely to become truly apparent in years to come.

Missed developmental milestones, plummeting school attendances, increased screen time and device dependence, a surge in support for populist politics, "a 'tsunami' of mental health problems" - all of which are exacerbating existing inequalities while being themselves being exacerbated by the economic consequences of the pandemic.

It's incredibly hard to know where to start in tackling these issues - but I'd suggest that we might begin by actually acknowledging them (and the collective trauma that COVID has caused) and accepting that substantial targeted effort and investment is needed, rather than dismissively blundering on in the belief that a return to business as usual is best.