The greatest casualty of all, of course, was liberty. The liberal assumption that you can do as you please, unless the law says otherwise, was turned on its head. For months on end, we were banned from leaving the house without a state-sanctioned excuse. Police took it upon themselves to monitor the skies with drones, rifle through people’s shopping baskets and break into their homes, often without any legal justification. Lockdown represented, in the words of one Court of Appeal judge, ‘possibly the most restrictive regime on the public life of persons and businesses ever’.

The real scandal of lockdown is not just its ineffectiveness. It is not just the obvious and measurable harms it has caused to health, wealth and education. No, it is the fact that our freedoms were so quickly and comprehensively confiscated from us, and that our most precious liberties could be so easily overridden. We must never repeat this inhuman experiment.