Blog post #4 Shielding - An intimate and collective labour

By Kirsty Liddiard

A shielding letter issued by the Department of Health and Social Care
Photograph team's own
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We are writing this short blog post to mark the five year anniversary of the government’s announcement of shielding in March 2020. In addition, COVID-19 Day of Reflection 2025 has just taken place on Sunday 9th March 2025. Shielding quickly became a widespread practice for those deemed clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) to Covid-19. Put simply, shielding was defined by Public Health England (2020: np.) as ‘staying at home at all times and avoiding face-to-face contact’. You can read a helpful timeline of shielding here (Runswick-Cole 2020). Many members of our Cripping Breath team shielded during the pandemic, and many disabled and chronically ill people - particularly those with respiratory conditions - continue to practice forms of shielding to this day, particularly at certain times of the year. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, 2.2m people were initially clinically identified by NHS England and were advised to shield. However, shielding as a practice was far wider: with over 13.9m disabled people (Scope, 2020) and 11.9m over 65s in the UK (Age UK, 2019), millions of disabled, chronically ill and older people who were not clinically identified practiced shielding for their own protection. In not being formally or clinically identified, they were routinely excluded from the forms of support that came with being clinically identified, such as assistance from the National Shielding Service.

Some of our team have written about the impacts of Covid-19, as disabled people identified as clinically extremely vulnerable in the pandemic. For example, our Artist-in-Residence Jamie Hale produced the groundbreaking work, Shield (2021). Shield takes the form of a sonnet, whereby Jamie ‘kept rewriting and re-experiencing different voices and identities to explore what it means to face one’s mortality so directly, suddenly, and unexpectedly’ (Hale, 2021: 8):

‘it is confirmed i am not a priority

for treatment my doctor delicately said

that it would be saved for people who

would survive. my ventilator stares

at me i stare at myself and out of the window

at the sky but the virus is staring back

from beneath your skin you have become

a timebomb turning me in bed a timebomb’

Cripping Breath team member Kirsty Liddiard also wrote about her experiences. One post was written at the very onset of the pandemic and was entitled Surviving Ableism in Covid Times (Liddiard 2020). This essay unpacked the everyday lived realities of dis/ableism in the current COVID 19 crisis for disabled and marginalised others. An update was published a year later; this essay focusing specifically on the practicality, politics and emotionality of shielding as an intimate and collective labour (Liddiard 2021; np): 

'The number of times I’ve contemplated the bizarreness of shielding, and Covid-19, as I’ve sat dutifully washing up food shopping deliveries, bleaching down packets of pasta because my life now depended on it. We couldn’t get a food delivery for the first 6 weeks, meaning our cupboards were relatively bare.

When the new variants emerged before Christmas, I didn’t even leave the house at all until my first vaccination on 4th February 2021. We bleached door handles, switches, plugs, floors, walls, and toilets when our nephew, who lived with us at the time, had to go back into college. This was by far the hardest, yet most unspoken, part of shielding: having to socially distance even from those in your own home. Many shielding parents have had to face fines for keeping their children out of school or risk their lives every day. Shielders whose partners had to return to work have had to sleep in separate rooms and beds. Many shielders have had to not be physically close to, hug or share close airspace with those they live with, often for many months at a time. Thus, the impacts upon one’s intimacies with others has been, for me, the most indescribably difficult aspect of shielding.

Such distance has challenged even the closest of relationships. My partner and I chose not to distance from each other, but this meant shielding together in the most extreme of ways - my partner didn’t see his friends, family, or work colleagues for 462 days either. He’s also carried much of the work and stress of shielding - protecting, cleaning, scrubbing, worrying, advocating and loving - showing that shielding is undoubtedly a collective and intimate labour (see Liddiard 2018). To be at risk of death for over a year, and to change your entire life and the lives of those you love, to ask them to sacrifice their own freedoms, all in the name of your protection, is the ultimate act of love and care.'

So, while we know that disabled people and their families have been deeply impacted by Covid-19, and that this has had significant emotional and affective impacts for our communities, we want to use our blog to (re)acknowledge shielding as a key form of labour carried out by disabled and chronically ill people, their families and loved ones on this important 5 year anniversary. While Cripping Breath isn’t solely a project about Covid-19, as we collect stories of respiratory illness across the project we are sure that Covid-19 will be lurking in many ways. One of our aims is to collect and document these often missing or sequestered narratives of the pandemic. 

A shielding letter (page 2) issued by the Department of Health and Social Care
Photograph team's own

Shielding was formally ended by the Conservative government on 31st March 2021, long before the everyday risks of Covid-19 were survivable for clinically extremely vulnerable people, and before many of the most vulnerable had been vaccinated. However you choose to mark COVID-19 Day of Reflection 2025, please don’t forget that the majority of those who lost their lives to Covid-19 were disabled people (ONS, 2025), and that it remains a continuing risk for many, and finally, that Covid-19 continues to take the lives of people weekly in the UK (ONS 2025).

References

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