'Weight of responsibility' - Covid five years on

Today marks five years since Guernsey went into lockdown in a bid to curb the spread of coronavirus.

With only one community case, the then Chief Minister Deputy Gavin St Pier told us to "stay at home".

Looking back on that moment, he said he was aware that he was making a "historically momentous decision".

By the end of March 2023, Guernsey had reported 35,326 cases of Covid-19 and 41 people died from the virus.

St Pier said the restrictions on movement in lockdown had not been seen since the Nazi occupation during World War Two.

He said: "The restrictions were arguably even more restrictive than in some parts of that period, in terms of people literally being confined to their homes and unable to move."

As chief minister, St Pier was also the chair of the Civil Contingences Authority (CCA), which was the body that enacted emergency legislation to put lockdown rules into law.

To help make his decisions, he was getting advice from the Director of Public Health Dr Nicola Brink.

St Pier said Guernsey and other jurisdictions "were all working to the same model of the potential impact on the population and the risk of excess deaths".

"I think we were working to a model that was suggesting it could have been 1,800 unexpected deaths."

While making his decisions on how to react to the pandemic, St Pier said he had to think of both the health and economic implications of them.

"It was tricky, trying to weigh up all the factors and also not knowing the likely length of lockdown.

"It ended up being longer than we expected at the outset but, obviously, significantly shorter than elsewhere.

"I think the consequences were quite difficult to foresee and the best we could do was make decisions with the information available and keep adjusting our decisions as we went through the process."

Sir Richard Collas was bailiff at the time, just weeks away from retiring.

While the bailiff is not a permeant member of the CCA, Sir Richard said he was invited to be part of the discussions.

He said: "It was hugely impressive, people usually criticise the States for being slow, indecisive and not doing things, but when it came to it decisions were taken quickly."

During lockdown, the island's community adopted the "Guernsey Together" attitude and heeded the advice from government.

Sir Richard said the level of compliance took him by surprise.

"I wasn't sure that people would comply, I expected that there might be legal challenges to those, and those challenges would need to be dealt with very quickly.

"One of the law changes the CCA put through at my suggestion was to enable the Court of Appeal to sit remotely - most of the barristers and judges are practising in the UK who come over to Guernsey and the law requires that they are required to sit in person.

"That would've been impossible in lockdown, we wouldn't have gotten barristers to come over here for a court sitting on the basis they'd have two weeks in a hotel room."

After St Pier had made the announcement that the islands were to lockdown, Sir Richard addressed the bailiwick in an online video.

Looking back at the video Sir Richard said: "I was nervous doing it because I was conscious of the importance of it. It didn't feel like I had sufficient time to prepare.

"I think with the knowledge I had from my son about how serious this could be, I think that helped me to be quite stern and say 'you've got to comply' because that was the sort of lecture I was getting from my son [who worked in intensive care in London]."

That video address would be the final time Sir Richard would be in the bailiff's office as its holder.

Dr Brink played an important part of Guernsey's pandemic response.

She was the person giving the politicians the facts and forecasts to help in their decision-making.

In the days leading up to lockdown, Dr Brink said the island "didn't have the tools" to deal with the virus.

"Our on-island testing hadn't yet been fully developed, it came online about a week later. Our swab-to-result was about a week so our ability to respond in real-time was very limited.

"We all felt the weight of responsibility at that stage," she said.

The public team worked unrelenting hours during lockdown, Dr Brink remembers, getting into work at 06:00 and not leaving until about 23:00, seven days a week.

"There were so many acts of kindness that it's so difficult to quantify them all.

"I can remember one night when we were working at 11pm, none of us had had any supper and we were absolutely exhausted and there was a bang on the window outside Le Vauquiedor - and someone had dropped off a whole pile of food for us."

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