• The country during the Covid years

Sri Lanka has been my home by choice for 13 years. My children have grown up here. They have gone to school here. I am married to a Sri Lankan woman who embodies much of what I admire about this place. I love the country – its food, its rhythms, its people. 

If there were an international championship for friendliness and unassuming decency, Sri Lankans would reach the final most years. That this remains true despite a very dark recent past makes it more, not less, remarkable.

It is also why what follows deserves to be described carefully.

A nation under lockdown 

Living in Sri Lanka during Covid didn’t feel like a sudden rupture so much as a tightening. 

Lockdown slid easily into a country long accustomed to curfew – and in Sri Lanka, curfew means you do not leave your house unless someone higher up says you may. This was not a novel idea here. It had been rehearsed for decades through war, unrest, and emergency rule. So when a nationwide curfew was imposed on 20 March 2020, people complied quickly. Not because it felt sensible, but because it felt familiar.

A long, grinding sequence of shutdowns and near-shutdowns set in.

Curfews, isolation orders, sudden reversals. August brought new clusters and sealed-off neighbourhoods. October followed with extended quarantine curfews in the Western Province, entire districts paused again. Then in 2021, a nationwide shutdown in May as cases rose, and another islandwide closure from late August into October. Each phase was announced as temporary. Each lasted longer than suggested.

Even when restrictions eased, the sense that they could snap back overnight never really went away. Plans stayed provisional. Life stayed small.

Enforcement often drifted from strict into something closer to performance art. Drones were used to monitor neighbourhoods, particularly dense and poorer ones. Arrests followed, often reported with a curious enthusiasm. Mask rules were enforced with zeal – by authorities and, at times, by neighbours. When I went out to exercise in my small stretch of lane, I was more than once politely reminded by a diligent wearer of mask and face shield that I ought to cover my face while running in circles just outside my own house.

People were warned that they could be arrested, named, even taken to court, for going against the ever-changing guidelines. We had to wear masks inside vehicles, including when travelling with family members. At times it felt less like public health and more like an audition for seriousness.

Schools were closed for an extraordinary length of time. Depending on how full and partial closures are counted, Sri Lanka sits among the worst-affected countries globally with regard to school – we went roughly 70 weeks without normal in-person schooling. 

Families with a single phone or laptop had to decide which child got to ‘attend’ class. Internet connections dropped constantly. Teachers were pushed online with little training and no support. Lessons happened when they could, often badly, often not at all. Large chunks of childhood simply vanished. The bill for that will be paid later.

Dealing with death

Officially, Sri Lanka recorded around 17,000 Covid deaths, out of fewer than 700,000 confirmed cases, giving a Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of about 2.5%. CFR is a measure of deaths divided by confirmed cases. Sri Lanka’s CFR of 2.5% sounds bad, although it was still below some of the worst-hit places during peak waves. Early Italy, the UK, and parts of the US all reported significantly higher CFRs at various stages.

CFR, however, is not the same as Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). CFR measures deaths as a proportion of those who tested positive, but in Sri Lanka testing mainly occurred in hospitals. Home testing was not a thing. 

IFR, by comparison, measures deaths among everyone infected, including the many mild or asymptomatic cases that were never tested. IFR is therefore always lower than CFR, because its denominator is larger. The two figures answer different questions.

Sri Lanka never had sustained mass testing beyond major urban centres, meaning a substantial share of infections went uncounted. CFR can be calculated from official data; IFR is far harder to know and cannot even be reliably estimated without large-scale serological studies. 

In public discussion, however, the distinction was often blurred. CFRs were compared with IFR estimates from other countries – or with IFR figures from severe influenza seasons – and alarm followed when the former was higher than the latter, although this will nearly always be the case. It was a category error, but a persuasive one. Nor was this confusion uniquely Sri Lankan; similar comparisons circulated widely in international media.

Meanwhile, Sri Lankan English-language newspapers kept a running tally of total deaths on their front pages – from the first recorded death onward – for well over a year. The cumulative number rose daily, detached from context, age profile, comorbidities, or denominator. It was a powerful headline device. Whether it clarified risk is another question.

What is clear is who died. The average age at death was around 68 (life expectancy here is 77–78 years) with the vast majority over 60, and deaths clustered heavily among people with diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. Risk was narrow and skewed. The response was not.

Policy was built on thin data, applied to everyone equally, and enforced with great seriousness, even though the underlying risk profile wasn’t evenly distributed. 

When vaccines arrived, inequality stopped pretending to hide. The first shipment – around 500,000 doses of Western pharmaceutical vaccines donated by India in early 2021 – moved quickly through urban, connected circles. Older people outside major cities waited. Later shipments included Chinese vaccines. Officially this was due to logistics. Unofficially, it felt like access outranking need.

Online, certainty was abundant. Vietnam and Thailand can do it. Why can’t we? Context rarely featured in the comparison.

One example was the call for a zero-Covid elimination strategy, citing New Zealand as proof that an island could seal itself off and suppress transmission. The comparison was easy. The differences – fiscal reserves, state capacity, and the ability to subsidise prolonged border closures – were not. The model travelled well. The balance sheet did not.

The Institute for Health Policy – which describes itself as an independent, non-profit research body committed to improving health and welfare in Sri Lanka – advocated strongly for lockdowns, strict border controls, mandates, and a zero-Covid approach. It was widely listened to and treated with authority. I had a number of polite, if faintly maddening, exchanges on Twitter with individuals affiliated to the institute; the tone was civil, the conviction unwavering. Their commitment to the mission was never in doubt.

Questionable interventions

Sri Lanka has long been conditioned to look Westward for validation, and many people became strangely angry when the country failed to replicate policies designed for places with deep pockets, strong institutions, and the luxury of discovering Zoom in March 2020.

The developed world was emphatic about masks, distancing, and confinement, but comparatively muted about something simpler: sunlight. 

By mid-2020, there was growing discussion in the medical literature connecting Vitamin D deficiency to worse Covid outcomes, particularly among elderly and darker-skinned populations. It was also widely understood that respiratory viruses, including earlier coronaviruses, spread far more efficiently indoors than in open air. 

Sri Lanka is a tropical country with abundant sun, yet policy centred on keeping people indoors. There was no serious public campaign around safe sunlight exposure or supplementation, and no Western authority appeared especially interested in encouraging one. The guidance was uniform: stay home. For a respiratory virus in a sun-rich country, the absence of proportion was striking. Visible restriction seemed to matter more than low-cost adaptation.

What tends to get quietly skipped now is what came next.

Sri Lanka’s 2022 economic collapse is usually presented as tragic but inevitable – the delayed bill for years of bad policy, corruption, and structural weakness. That story is tidy. It is also incomplete.

The Covid response accelerated the collapse. Lockdowns hollowed out the economy. Tourism – the country’s main source of foreign revenue – was switched off. Work such as street vending, construction labour, domestic service, and small-scale fishing – the informal economy that sustains millions day to day – stopped almost overnight. Small businesses burned through savings, then turned to debt, and spent that too. Foreign exchange dried up while spending continued as if the economy were merely paused for maintenance.

By the time the International Monetary Fund arrived in the middle of 2022 with its sober briefings and restructuring plans, the damage was already embedded.

From March to late July 2022, families and businesses across the island endured power cuts of up to 13 hours a day. The remaining hours were often spent in queues – for gas cylinders, for diesel, for petrol – sometimes sitting in a car for days to secure a few litres. Life contracted to darkness and waiting.

It did not matter if you were wealthy enough to own a generator. Generators require fuel. Fuel did not exist. Money could cushion inconvenience in normal times; it could not conjure supply in a shortage.

Yet when the crisis is discussed now, the country’s response to Covid is treated like bad weather. Regrettable. Unavoidable. Nobody’s fault.

The same institutions that insisted there was no alternative now speak calmly of ‘lessons learnt’. The curfews that helped make the collapse inevitable are politely forgotten. Apparently, once the country ran out of fuel, it also ran out of memory.

Resilience and humanity

And yet, despite my tone, some of my abiding memories are positive. When the lights went out and the queues lengthened, queues became social spaces. Strangers shared food and information. Tempers flared occasionally, but more often there was patience, improvisation, even humour. Sri Lankans adapted – quickly and without waiting for permission.

During the curfews, online delivery of food, documents, and schooling, which had been edging forward for years, became normalised. People made it work with whatever technology they had.

In many neighbourhoods something quieter took hold: neighbours checked in on one another, essentials were pooled, and people noticed when someone had not been seen for a while.

Under curfew, under surveillance, under rules that often made little sense, there was resilience. Improvised. Uneven. Human. It is a kind of steadiness that wealthier nations, less accustomed to scarcity, might struggle to imagine.

That is what I remember.

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)