Throughout Britain’s Covid emergency, the public have overwhelmingly supported drastic but necessary measures to combat the virus – even at the cost of their personal freedom. As the Alpha variant threatened to cripple the NHS in January, 85% of people supported lockdown – as near universal as you are likely to achieve in a democratic society – with only 11% opposed, and of those just over half opposed strongly. From the beginning, the prevailing criticism among the electorate has been that Boris Johnson’s administration has been too slow and soft in reacting: in the first weeks of the crisis, two-thirds believed it should have acted faster. Yet since Omicron revived the Covid threat, that consensus has collapsed. Last week, just 23% of adults in England supported closing pubs and restaurants, 26% backed not allowing people to meet indoors with people outside their household, and there was an even split on large sporting and entertainment events. Those numbers may shift more in favour of restrictions as cases continue to rise, but the difference from last year is stark. The public’s often militant support for authoritarian measures has disintegrated. This is not to say we should succumb to fatalism and let disillusionment with Covid measures veto any response at all. The core dilemmas of the pandemic remain. How do we keep cases as low as possible, above all else to prevent the NHS from being so overwhelmed by Covid patients that it cannot perform its basic function? There is obviously a point where restrictions would be unavoidable, and the lag between infections and later hospitalisation and death makes determining that point and selling the public on it difficult. But we must acknowledge that the waning support of the wider public cannot simply be dismissed as Covid denialism. Or as conspiratorial delusion and heartless contempt for human life, precisely the sort of perverse crankery epitomised by Piers Corbyn. Indeed, to do so risks abandoning the growing ranks of the disenchanted to conspiracy-mongers who claim drastic measures to preserve public health and human life were always as unnecessary as they were malign in intent. Their exhaustion is understandable. It is no surprise that polling shows young people generally most opposed to new restrictions. They have acted as a cordon sanitaire to protect old and medically vulnerable people. While the threat of long Covid to young people should not be dismissed, the risk to their lives has been very low. Yet the ability to socialise or establish relationships in their best years has been criminalised; their educations have been injured; their mental health more damaged than that of older generations. On top of more than a decade of austerity policies that disproportionately targeted the young – and a government which believes there is little to be gained electorally from policies that alleviate their distress – they quite rationally believe they have been abandoned. More widely, consider the 8 million people who live alone, condemned to often painful solitude; the low-paid who, unlike middle-class professionals, were compelled to travel to often unsafe workplaces; or the families in overcrowded flats with no gardens where their children can play. The severity of lockdown always depended on your generation and your class. The trouble isn’t that the public no longer want to stop Covid, rather that the social contract underpinning the pandemic has been shredded. Overwhelming support for lockdown persisted for so long because there seemed to be a stable exit route: that mass vaccination of the population would protect the NHS from the menace of Covid-related collapse. Now that certainty has evaporated an endgame no longer seems sure and the prospect of open-ended restrictions looms. That those responsible for designing the rules and demanding public acquiescence did not abide by the rules themselves – while homeless people were being unlawfully prosecuted for breaking lockdown – further damaged the contract. The true threat posed by Omicron isn’t yet understood, and measures to protect the basic functions of the NHS may need to be taken. But whether the public’s overwhelming obedience to restrictions will endure this time round is now an open question, particularly among younger and poorer Britons who have suffered the worst excesses of the pandemic response. That means emphasising approaches to combat Covid that don’t simply rely on universally restricting freedom. Hiking statutory sick pay and other forms of economic support so workers can afford to self-isolate would improve currently dismal compliance rates, for example. There should also be more support for those who want to work from home, and an emergency programme to improve ventilation in schools and workplaces. As well as helping to contain infections, this would send a powerful message that the government isn’t simply waiting for a new crisis point to be reached before once again abruptly curtailing our freedoms in panicked response. More broadly, there needs to be a focus on permanently and dramatically expanding the capacity of the NHS. In “normal” times this would be of great benefit – people could enjoy a much-improved, less-pressured service – but crucially, the NHS would be protected from shocks such as Covid overwhelming it. This isn’t an instant, straightforward solution – training more medical staff takes time – but a public debate on expanding capacity must surely be the focus. One medical consultant suggests that increasing NHS bed capacity by 10% – back to pre-austerity levels – would allow the service to cope with 200,000 Omicron cases a day, noting it would need to be complemented with improved pay and conditions to retain and recruit staff. If yet another dangerous variant emerges, more restrictions might still be needed – but at least the public would be assured that the government has pursued every possible avenue first. Lockdowns were always understood to come with dire social and educational consequences: but they were a lesser evil than allowing a virus to kill hundreds of thousands, and cause the collapse of the NHS. A sizeable minority are content with indefinite suspensions of freedom – a poll earlier this year found nearly a fifth supported a 10pm curfew, and a quarter the closure of all nightclubs and casinos – but most are rightly not. The false dichotomy between harsh authoritarian measures or mass death must be abandoned for good. But that will require the government to fund and support more targeted measures. A new consensus must be built around such an approach because the public are beginning to snap, and nearly two years on from the outbreaks of mysterious pneumonia-like cases in Wuhan, our suffocated reality is no longer sustainable. Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist