A similar reluctance to leave home has been observed after the easing of the current lockdown which has been described as a form of ‘deep-shelter mentality.’Įvidence from the Blitz provides insight into how powerful this mentality is in times of threat since the government had to adapt its shelter policy by abandoning the external deep shelters and instead provide internal steel cages to allow people to shelter safely at home. Staying at home and ‘deep shelter mentality’ĭuring the Blitz the government did not predict that the majority of people would prefer to shelter in their own homes rather than the safer external underground ‘deep shelters’ that had been provided. A key similarity between the two situations at this point was the failure to learn from comparable events overseas. Even though war had been declared surveys indicated that the majority of people were not taking air-raid precautions and, despite reports of the deadly virus in China, large public events in the UK such as the Cheltenham Races, continued to take place. In both the pre-war and the pre-lockdown periods there was a lessening of initial anxiety around the respective threats.
By analysing documents from five departments of government for the period of 1938 to 1945 from the UK National Archives and documents released by scientific advisory groups during the current pandemic, the study drew comparisons between the response of the British public and the government in the two situations and identified a number of similarities.
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