The legal requirement to self-isolate when infected with the coronavirus will end in England on February 24, the UK prime minister has announced. It’s been two long years since the start of the pandemic, and during that time, our everyday behaviours have been subject to a number of rules and regulations. Removing self-isolation is one of the final steps in reversing these rules and moving towards “living with COVID”.

Like many, I feel it’s too early for this move. It is also a bad idea to stop providing free lateral flow tests, which from April 1 people will need to pay for. But perhaps more important is what the public thinks. How might people behave once free testing and mandatory self-isolation are scrapped?

Just as it’s hard to predict what the virus will do in the future, so too is it hard to predict people’s behaviour. Very few of us in Britain have emerged from a pandemic before. That said, we can look to the past – and to behavioural science – to make an informed guess about what people will do.

We know that adherence to COVID measures in the UK has been, on balance, very high throughout the pandemic. That said, research has suggested that some form of “pandemic fatigue” did eventually set in, causing adherence to measures to fall, particularly for “high-cost” behaviours such as lockdowns or restrictions on visiting others.

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