By reducing the virus’s prevalence, “flattening the curve” gave some people more confidence to interact with vulnerable relatives or other social contacts, eliminating costly self-imposed constraints that also wouldn’t show up in government stats.

But the lesson in acknowledging these forgotten social liberties is that so much of what makes life worth living is unobserved by the policymaker. Most value that we get from human interaction just does not appear in any Office for National Statistics datasets.

As individuals, we muddle through life trying to make the best out of it, acting on our very personal preferences and values. Adverse shocks such as omicron curtail our options to fulfil our true wishes and desires, and so are costly.

One virtue of liberty ordinarily is that free choice enables us to constantly deliberate over our decisions in these new situations, harnessing that very personal information about what we value most to recalibrate our lives.

That’s one reason why there should be an incredibly high bar for governments to clear to curb our freedoms. Bureaucrats using blunt mandates ignore that localised, incalculable knowledge that cannot be neatly aggregated into an economic equilibrium model or a utility function.

Covid was a societal problem that had such a potentially high death toll, that it has cleared the bar on occasion. But other government limits on our lives do not. And when people chirp lazily about “evidence-based policy” or “following the science” when proposing new lifestyle controls, the implicit value they attach to social liberties often appears to be zero.

When the economic history of this pandemic is written, much will be made of the unprecedented nature of the crisis. A new House of Commons Library report reminds us that monthly economic output fell by 25pc from February to April 2020, with GDP collapsing by 9.7pc overall in 2020. Government borrowing jumped to 15pc of GDP that year, with an astounding £315bn additional fiscal support for households, businesses, and public services through today.

The figures are mind-boggling. Yet none adequately capture the full costs of the crisis because they do not, and cannot, quantify the value of our lost liberties or the destruction wrought by the constraints Covid has imposed. From the humble after-work pint to the hug with grandma, this crisis has exposed the value of the social freedoms we usually take for granted.

Ryan Bourne is the author of ‘Economics In One Virus’ and an economist at the Cato Institute