Official data shows that England’s lockdown caused an extra 1 million people to become addicted to alcohol since the start of the pandemic.

Before the pandemic began, government polling indicated that there were around 1.5 million alcoholics in the country, meaning people who drank at least 50 units every week.

“But this jumped to just shy of 2.5 million this summer, which experts have blamed on the endless cycle of virus-controlling restrictions,” reports the Daily Mail.

According to alcohol abuse expert Dr Tony Rao of King’s College London, “The impact of the Covid pandemic on alcohol use has been devastating. The latest data, taken together with the highest number of alcohol-specific deaths on record, is a stark warning for the Government.”

Alcohol charities are warning of a crisis “that is happening now” after Public Health England revealed that “deaths directly caused by alcohol soared by 20% during the first year of the pandemic.”

As we highlighted earlier, young children’s cognitive development during lockdown was also severely impaired as a result of a lack of human interaction and mask mandates.

The true impact of lockdowns on the health and well-being of both young and old won’t be properly known until years into the future.

However, studies already undertaken into the devastation it will cause are chilling.

A data analyst consortium in South Africa concluded that the economic consequences of the country’s lockdown would lead to 29 times more people dying than the coronavirus itself.

As we previously reported, Academics from Duke, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins have concluded that there could be around a million excess deaths over the next two decades as a result of lockdowns.

Back in June, Stanford University professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya warned that in years to come lockdowns will be looked back upon as the most catastrophically harmful policy in “all of history.”