So can you just start by saying your name and what your current job title is?
My name is Mary Daly and I am a professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Oxford.
So I'm interested in how you got to be where you are now.
But if you could quite briefly give me the main headlines in your career so far, how you got interested in social policy and particularly care.
And then we'll talk a bit more about what the the issues are as a research area.
So my original education, which was in Ireland, was as a social worker.
My degree was what we called social administration, and I started there wanting to be a social worker.
But quite quickly I realised actually through the degree I also did a master's in social sciences,
I realised quite quickly I was more interested in research rather than in social work, and I think I was better at research than social work.
And that led me then to research the field. So I've researched, I've worked in many different countries.
I did another, I did my PhD at the European University Institute at Florence, and that was also in social sciences and sociology in particular.
I've worked in a number of different countries in the fields. I'm interested in really family wellbeing, gender care, European Union, social policy,
and I work very much from a comparative perspective, but mainly high income countries rather than the world at large.
That's very, very helpful, very good background. So what would you say are the main questions that you were investigating up to?
We will get to go with in a minute. But before that, in relation particularly to care of of young children and also of older people.
So I very interested in questions around wellbeing and how we as a society can create the maximum well-being for the maximum number of people.
And that leads me particularly perhaps to a concern with people or sectors of the population who may not be able to secure their own wellbeing.
And it also leads me to an analysis of the state and the welfare state in particular.
So the kinds of questions I suppose that I have considered most explicitly and consistently
in my work is about the role of the state and how the state can contribute to wellbeing,
but also how it sometimes detracts from wellbeing and how it is very much a site of contestation and a site of change over time.
For me, care is a very widespread concept concept.
Obviously we have the care of people who cannot take care of themselves, young children or perhaps fragile adults, fragile for different reasons.
But I think it's a much broader principle.
I think it's about how we as a society organise ourselves because I see that we all need care at various stages.
I don't subscribe to a view of the world as consisting of independent people and dependent people.
I think we're interdependent, so care is very much about the world meeting the wellbeing needs of everyone
and of us not just caring for each other but caring about each other as well.
And what are the main components of care, would you say?
Well, actually there is quite some quite good academic literature that has really tried to think to to work this out.
So there is, I suppose, the activities of providing for other people's needs, you know, doing the housework, cooking the meals,
taking the children to school, spending time with people, older people or people of different generations who cannot do things for themselves.
That's the kind of what's been called caring for.
But then there is another tie or component which is caring about, and that's much more about how we relate to other people,
what responsibility we take for other people, and also actually for our environment.
So it's it's much broader than the actual task of caring.
It's about an orientation that makes us take responsibility and share responsibility as well.
And in the work that you've done,
how much interaction is there between you and deliveries of care at either a regional and national or an international level?
There is there's some interaction, I would say. I mean, working as I do on the welfare state,
this leads me very much to social policy and to policymakers and to think tanks and international organisations that advise on policy,
that devise policies. See that analysed policy critically.
So I think I have quite a lot of influence and have done quite a lot of work
with organisations that are funding research to improve a practice in general.
I have a less work, I think,
with decision makers themselves in governments because I have lived in different places and actually you need to have a stable,
you need to work in places I think for 20 years or 30 years to actually have a network,
a network of policymakers that you can talk to or that you can identify and who know and trust your work.
I do have some networks, but it's probably not as engaged as some other people.
I've worked a lot for the European Union. I've worked for the Council of Europe.
I have worked for the ILO. When I say worked for,
I mean done projects funded by them and been engaged in activities that they organise around policy learning or policy analysis.
So I think at an international I've worked also for the UN, so at an international level I have good contacts,
but there are probably these organisations you wouldn't say are policy makers per say.
Then in terms of the deliverers of service, that varies about.
But one of the activities that I've been involved in in Oxford is at my college Green Templeton College.
I set up what I call a care initiative, which is what it says on the title, really to have conversations about care.
I set this up ten years ago because I believe fundamentally we need to be talking about care.
And actually we have quite a big mailing list and quite good we meet or I hold
usually lectures or discussion sessions about six times a year and many people come,
we have an email list, it's about 350 honoured and many of the people who come are local and they could be people
who are themselves involved in care provision or who have an interest as well as academics.
But many are care providers, care home owners, for example, or other care providers, or we have the County Council come coming on occasion as well.
So that's my contact with them, I suppose, through my research as well,
because I've done some work on care homes and we've had to have contact with care home owners or the service providers in that regard.
So I have some contact with those. And when you work on policy, you always have a you always have to talk to people who deliver, really.
So that always comes into my work. Okay, well, let's get to it.
So can you remember when you first heard that there was something going on in China that looked a bit worrying and how
soon it was when you realised that actually this was something that was going to be relevant to your area of interest?
I think I probably heard Christmas 2019.
I do keep abreast of, you know, the current affairs of news, and I think at that stage there was some stirrings about what was happening in China,
but probably I didn't really realise the significance of it until January.
And then I remember in February I got a cold, a very bad I had a very bad cough and I was really thinking maybe this is COVID.
And I'm actually not unconvinced that it wasn't COVID because I had I couldn't get rid of my cough.
It was the worst cough I ever had. It was for thought I had it for about three weeks.
So that around that time period, I think, and of course academics started talking about it then to maybe not so much academics in this country,
but certainly I have lost a lot of networks in Italy. And if you remember, it hit Italy terribly badly.
And so some of my Italian friends were saying, or Italian colleagues, I should say,
were saying there's something going on here in you know, in nursing homes and and deaths of are illness and deaths among older people.
January, particularly February. And I think by late February, I knew there was something serious.
And so how did you respond in the in the research sense and I know you've done various things,
but let's let's take care homes to start with, because that was quite early on this move, to move people out of hospital into care homes.
And and as time went on, it became clear that care homes were a potential site of of infection.
Well, I felt we needed to have the information on what was happening.
And so and I were also teaching on some of this.
So we started in.
Even in 2020, although it was early because if I recall correctly, our last class was sometimes in early March 2020 at the end of Hillary,
the term which would have been early to mid-March, but we had actually started talking about it in in the class, in the class as well.
What I felt the need for was to seek out information, as much information I could on what was happening.
And I had been work that much actually, on care homes.
So as I explained to my concern, my general interest is in care, broadly conceive and care of older people in particular.
That's kind of my main interest. So I hadn't actually really done a lot of work in care homes, but I started to actually read and write.
I may write my own thoughts on it, and that probably was the beginning of what I did.
Of course, I had to be concerned about my students, some of whom also study care and, you know, take care of my students in that regard as well.
And the general panic, I mean, there was a lot of panic among students.
I didn't feel particularly panicked myself, as I recall.
So I usually I ask questions about how you felt about it later on.
But so how did you go about gathering information?
Oh, well, I use the public. I found the newspapers actually extremely good, I must say, and they broke a lot of revelations about, if I recall,
I read the first thing I read about care homes, people being released to care homes without tests from hospital.
I think I read that in the media.
I didn't actually read that in the government side, but certainly government sites, also the Department of Health and Care,
looking at all their briefings, for example, watching the briefings on TV and that.
So, I mean, my other work was going on. You know, I can't remember what I was working at at that time,
but I certainly felt the need to be very cognisant of what was happening, particularly in regard as the care homes story unfolded.
I then decided perhaps by March, that I actually needed to be really active on this and get as much as get as much information as I can.
And then in May I decided I would myself present to the CARE initiative,
which I mentioned earlier, and I think I made a big what I would think of a big presentation.
It was online, of course, on the 21st of May, outlining my analysis of what, you know,
what what was happening in care homes and much broader than just what was happening in care
homes because I didn't see what was happening in care care homes as accidental or partly,
you know, it wasn't apparent necessarily, you know, our care system contributed to it and how over time we've really disinvested in care,
I think, and how we've allowed a very complicated structure and lack of our governance is weak, I think of care homes.
So I wrote I gave the talk on the 21st of May, and then I actually and I had to do a lot of work coming up to it because,
as I said, I wasn't just looking what happened in care homes. I was looking at the whole structure of the NHS, the historic,
the history of social care in this country, and also the kind of decisions that had been taken.
And then I published the I got very quick turnaround from the Journal.
And in fact, when I published the article, what happened in Care Homes and Why?
It was, I think, one of the most one of the it was in the top 3% of reviewed articles in the journal.
It's faded now but initially it was yeah, that's very public.
Yes. So in terms of what you were saying earlier about caring for and caring for and
caring about what struck you at the time about how the pandemic showed up,
inequalities in how we cared about each other?
Yeah, I felt very strongly and I feel very strongly that we don't care really much as a society for people who we might say are weaker.
I wouldn't necessarily use that. I'd be careful about how I use that word.
But I, you know, the term I usually say is people who cannot take full care of themselves.
I felt that again.
So I don't think it was an accident. What happened? I think I'm not saying it was a deliberate either, but I think it reveals four really core things.
This about our society. And one of them was that we don't actually care much about what happens to people who are in institutions and care homes,
but also other institutions, because it didn't just happen in care homes.
It happened also in our care homes for older people. It happened in most institutions.
So that was what I what I felt about it.
I felt really passionately about it, that this needed to be out there because it's hard to to remember back to March and April and May.
It was so chaotic and 2020. But I felt that there was a real need to make a statement about it and to try and clarify exactly what happened.
Even the timeline I used, I had to really put in a lot of work to get the timeline right.
And I'm really happy that that's out there as a historical document.
It's not, of course, a the new timeline, but so I felt the need very much to get information out there because I felt people people cared, I think.
But I don't know if our institutions cared,
although I will say I do think the media actually did a major job in revealing what was happening in care homes and keeping with it for a long time.
So, you know, it's it's not easy to make generalisations and say that nobody cared.
No. And I remember positive stories about a particular home where all the staff
agreed to be shut in with the residents because so that they weren't coming in,
going in, risking bringing in. Absolutely. Absolutely.
And there was right across the media, it wasn't in one particular set of newspapers or whatever I'm thinking of the newspapers in particularly,
but I think the television stations do the same really well.
And you told me earlier that another of your projects was to look at care for children.
Yes, I am more international. Yes. I'm very interested in the.
So one of the kind of fields of studies I'm interested in is family or families.
And I try to, I suppose, in my work,
move away from a kind of a simplistic understanding of the family as a singular type with a mother or a father and a number of children.
And I come out of a gender background.
And so I suppose when you think about inequalities within families or when you work on gender,
you think of inequalities within families, power, inequalities and so forth.
And I've done a lot of work on that, looking at a lot of comparative work across countries and not establishing exactly
where the inequalities come from and how they're reinforced by by the state,
by the welfare state policies in particular. And that led me to think about children and age related inequalities within households and to start to,
in a way decompose or disaggregate family from child related perspective.
And children are actually in some ways, it's a big parallel between children and other people who need care for or can't fully care for themselves.
Their voices are often silenced. And so that's where my interest, I think, in children comes from and in care.
And and that's that was another thing I started quite early on as well, trying to document what was happening for families.
What kind of supports were families being given in countries, and were any of these supports being directed to children as against parents?
And there isn't necessarily an opposition between children and parents,
but there is a tendency or there is a theme in the literature that says we have to see children independently of parents as well.
So that was one of the one of the concerns I had.
And in relation to that, in this department, we put we got a small grant from the John Fell fund, I believe,
of the university to some colleagues and I to look at trackers that were tracking social policy and we wanted to
put together a resource for all the trackers that were available and because everywhere seemed to have a tracker,
but it was very hard to know what information was in particular trackers, you had to go to the trackers themselves.
So I, together with colleagues, I didn't actually lead on that.
I think we put together what we call a super tracker, which was tracking the trackers.
And I in putting that together. It was a few months work or I think we probably worked on that in mid 2020.
I realised very quickly there was nothing on children, there was nothing on families.
It was all about employment, It was all about jobs. It was all about health and that there was nothing on families.
So I started with some two of my Ph.D. students to put together.
We we got some money here from the department, mainly to start putting together what what countries were doing.
When countries introduce parental leave, do they pay parents to care for children at home?
Do they provide food, substitute food? When schools are closed?
Did they provide additional income?
Do they provide learning support? When did they give the vaccination to children as against giving it to adults?
So the result is we then subsequently got some funding from the UNICEF Office of Research in Florence,
and we've put together a database of 40 countries and it goes I mean,
we have information that goes beyond 2020, but most of the information relates to nine months of 20, 20, ten months in the case.
We have Japan and South Korea in there from Asia.
But most of the information is over nine months for 40 countries, mainly high income countries, European Union and all OECD countries in the main.
So that will be launched quite soon. Mm hmm. And so that was looking at policies.
Policies, Yes.
So let's start with I immediately start thinking about outcomes, but we're talking about the policies and how much a wider range would you say?
Obviously, you've got so many different components, so you've got education, health, income, all these these different things.
But those high income, relatively high income countries vary a lot from one another.
Hugely. Yes, hugely. Which is very interesting.
Just give me a couple of examples.
Well, for example, Sweden never shut down schools or early childhood education and care facilities and never had a general lockdown.
Sweden did many other countries.
They did have a general lockdown, but they kept, let's say, the early childhood, the kindergarten and care for young children.
They kept those open usually on two bases.
One was if the parents needed it.
So if parents were key workers, for example, but the others, including this country, if children had a vulnerability,
if they were considered disadvantaged, some countries prioritised and we were very interested was where was the prioritisation going on.
So there was so that's one form of variation.
Another form of variation is the duration of the lockdown.
In some countries, the lockdown of schools of primary schools was 18 months.
In some countries in others, schools were open again after four weeks or five weeks.
I think the certainly New Zealand was very good on that.
Really, really good, very wide ranging packet of supports.
They have very low levels of infection, They had very low levels of infection,
but they had a very strict policy and here a very strict policy meant shutting everything down there.
It didn't mean shutting everything down and in Australia as well.
But Australia is a bit more complicated because it's a federal unit.
So what was happening at the federal level, what was happening at the state level is difficult to track.
But yeah, so countries varied in whether they shut down schools, far more countries shut down schools and early childhood education,
surprisingly, and we think that was a devaluation of children in that they didn't consider children's needs.
They kept early childhood education and care settings open because of parents work obligations, but not for children.
They closed schools because they didn't feel the same concern for working parents and with school age children.
What else? I mean, some countries kept kept schools closed for significantly longer after the workplace is reopened.
It's quite hard to explain that. Other than that, you know, maybe it's protecting children, but maybe it's not.
So there were so many variations that it's fascinating, actually, to look at what countries did.
I also have to say that some countries were very innovative and were very quick.
Another of the variations was how long it took countries to react,
but some were very innovative, providing quite high levels of income support to families.
In addition, I remember Austria was a very good case.
It kept making these or not kept, but it gave a number of benefits to families over a course of time.
So I think families got, you know, about two or 3000 extra in that year, depending now on their circumstances, because very few countries gave you an.
Reversal benefits that were usually tied to need or the age of the children or something.
The other thing that countries did quite rapidly was they gave parents support.
So they extended parental leaves, for example.
Some countries even introduced a COVID specific leave, or they enable people to use sickness benefits for specifically for the care of children.
So that's interesting as well. There's a bit of a two sides to that, though, because, um, you know, uh,
it's kind of generally considered better for young children to be have some of their care and education outside of the home.
And of course, what COVID did and what countries supported happening was to move all of that into the
home and to give parents the responsibility in many cases without resourcing parents.
And we also know that there was a gender element in that, in that it was usually mothers who who did it.
And I think in general, closing down the early childhood education and care and the schools is not good for children.
And we now know that actually there are many learning gaps there.
I think we'll have to speak I don't know quite of a COVID generation, but we have to be aware.
There's there's there are many there are many children who are suffering ongoing learning loss because of it.
I think, again, when read I only read in the papers, but one reads a lot about both about learning loss,
but also mental health difficulties in children and young people.
And what I'm assuming the value of your database will be is that at some point we're very complicated,
but people might be able to tie those things together and relate them to the variation in the provision that was made.
Well, we certainly have the evidence because we have about ten or 12 fields for each policy action taken,
including when it was announced, including the announced cost.
If there was a cost, including, you know, who was the unit of eligibility,
was it because we do have information on whether countries provided extra psychosocial support or anti-violence support for children?
And again, we're very interested all the time. Was that child specific?
Was it explicitly directed at children or was it directed more at parents?
So we have all of that information. So hopefully in time, yes, people might be able to link it.
At least we have a record of what countries did. And as far as I know, it's it's a pretty unique record.
Right. I'm moving on because I know we haven't got very much time, but I see that you've also started a project on care workers themselves.
Yes. Was that something that came out of what you observed happening during the pandemic?
Absolutely, very much. I did a I got some research funding from the John Fell fund actually here to do some research on care home workers.
So not workers, not carers. You know, one always has to use the language very carefully.
So people who are employed in care home, right.
Rather than some people call these home care worker, you know, there's also home care workers, people who go into other people's home.
Yeah. And we interviewed I think it was we had a we had two types of research instrument.
One was an online survey and the other was an interview.
And we had, I think about 80 or 90 people who responded to the survey online.
And then we did interviews, quite detailed follow up interviews with about 30 people.
And what we wanted to see and it comes back to this thing about caring for and caring about,
was the kind of commitments that people had that those who are employed as carers have
and whether in a way they're that commitment allows them to be exploited or even even,
you know, stops them from making decisions that might be in their interests.
So many of them, and it was COVID specific, we asked about COVID,
but I think the general feeling was that people feel it's an extremely difficult job that they do in relatively poor conditions.
I mean, it's hardly above minimum wage in most instances.
Hours are very long. The kind of demands on them, sometimes implicit rather than necessarily explicit, explicit.
They do feel huge levels of commitment. And so they don't just care about care for they also care fundamentally about the people that they care for.
And that makes them immobile.
It makes them not able to leave their jobs or it certainly makes the process of thinking about, am I going to leave or can I leave much?
More difficult than it would be for somebody perhaps who doesn't have that kind of commitment.
So that was very interesting about how, you know, what are the aspects of their work that that tie them really to where they work.
And also, I was very interested in the how did they get there?
So was it, you know, something in there? Was it an absence?
So sometimes it's because people don't have other skills and there are always care home jobs or care jobs available.
Or was it something else? Was it something they really wanted to do?
Was it something they felt was very much in tune with their personality?
Did it come from their families, for example? And in fact, we did find and of course, they're almost all women.
Not not I think about maybe 20. It's a the gender breakdown is something like 20, 80%, I think.
And it's been a challenge for the industry to get men involved, actually.
But we did find that it kind of was a combination of things that it was in sometimes,
sometimes low income skilled are sorry, low income people who feel they don't have skills themselves.
But hey, I took care of an ill grandmother or my mother had a disability or my brother is unwell and I've been able to care for him.
That gives people confidence to say there were quite a number of cases who had come into care through that personal family route,
or often also because perhaps their mother was a carer or their grandmother or something.
So there's definitely a family route into care, but then there are also other routes as well,
which is sometimes about the local economy and the fact that people who do this work, they may not be able to travel for the work.
So there's a care home locally and they work in a care home.
But it was very it was a very affecting piece of research, really.
They I was very engaged with their stories.
I found that I had a researcher working with me on that.
So both of us were very engaged with the stories that they told, very moving stories, really.
MM And have you looked at all the way care for older and vulnerable people is structured?
I mean, in this country it seems to have gone more and more into the,
into the private sector and ownership of care homes is now something that private equity companies are interested in.
Whereas I don't I don't know enough about the history, but I assume that once upon a time it was seen much more as a local authority responsibility.
Andy Wood Yeah, I mean it was it's actually a revolution how let's say 40 years ago you would have had, it would be probably 90% local authority.
Now it's 5%. So it's really a revolution.
And I think and the way I understand the statistic now, let's say, in England is something like 5% local authority of care homes.
Now we're talking about 5% local authority, 85% for profit.
So these this is a classification that's used. They're commercial entities.
And then around something like ten, 12% for the more community based organisation.
So that is a revolution. And yes, I've looked at that.
I've looked at that not just in England but in many other countries and actually in the whole kind of care,
the working on 2020 on care homes that I did, the article and so forth, it was very much about the structure.
So the lack of governance, the seek you see Care quality commission, how limited their role is,
how limited the role of the Department of Health and Social Care is, how much this is now seen as a for profit entity.
Even though, having said that, I think it's most of the care home industry is still small care homes,
often local based, and they are for profit nominally, but often they they're not huge profit making entities.
In fact, they're less and less so. So, yes, the structure is very important.
And I've also done some work on looking at that internationally.
It is very extreme in the UK. Nowhere else.
While the US may be thinking of more the European Union countries and that nowhere else really has a structure like like we have,
I think Ireland may be a bit, but other than that it's much more state run or state funded with strong governance.
I think in this country we have turned too quickly to the private market.
And I don't know I don't know if that's a positive.
Development, really, because it's hard to police the private market.
And one hears stories about profit taking that they, you know, sell the assets or take the money out of the assets.
And then the operation of the care home is working on less resources on that.
And what percentage of people in the country are funded by the local authorities?
I think quite a small amount. I'm trying to recall the.
I'm trying to recall, I think something like between 50% and 60% of people in care homes in England fund themselves.
They may not fully fund themselves, but they're primarily what are called self funders.
And actually and they pay a lot of money, but actually they then almost inadvertently subsidise the public patients because if you talk to care homes,
they'll say we try to take as many of the self funders as we can because we don't get enough from the
local authorities for the the people who who need their help or need need to have their care funded.
But there is a bit of a grey area because the local authorities can park fund as well.
So it's not so clear who is fully funded by the local authorities.
I think it's small. I think it's less than 20% who is fully funded and then there's probably another 50%
or 40 something who are fully self-funded and in between people are subsidised,
but mostly people self-fund. Mm hmm.
Mm hmm. And yes, I think I've we've got 5 minutes left,
so I'll come to my final questions about how the working through the pandemic impacted on you personally.
I mean, first of all,
how threatened did you feel by the virus itself or did you think once you'd had that very bad respiratory illness in February that was you done?
No, I felt threatened by it. I felt I was going to get it.
And I you know, it changed my practice because of it.
I moved home. I mean, we shut down here, I moved home.
I set up an office at home.
I used to work at home a little bit, but never really as much as I like the routine of coming to the office, of walking to and fro.
So I was very affected by it, I think, and changed everything I did like everybody else.
I imagine so. And did you do you live alone or did?
My partner was with me at that stage. He doesn't live all the time with me, but he was with me at that stage.
And, you know, we we worked together. I mean, we we went out once a day or whatever we were allowed to do and shopping once a week.
I recall if I still feel when I look back that it still affects me.
That idea of when you've done your shop, you've somehow you're somehow okay.
You know, we had to do, if you recall, just one shop in the week.
I think that's all. That's how I recall it. And I remember saying, okay, that's the food and for the week, such a sense.
And then you come home and you start to clean everything. Because at that stage we still thought the antibacterial wipes would work.
But by June, I guess when we reopened again, I started to come into the office and there weren't many people who came in,
but I felt I needed it for my work environment and probably also for my health.
So I was coming and going. Then from then on, observing the lockdowns and there were periods again when we were fully lockdown,
but we were able to come and those of us who are involved in teaching were able to come in because we had to do a lot of teaching online.
And sometimes you wouldn't have the Internet connection sufficiently reliable at home.
So we had to do it here. So there were some of us in.
And do you think working that the experience of that I mean, more remote working and so on, has that changed your practice now,
now that technically we're supposed to think of it this all over, although I don't think it is,
but at least now that we've all been vaccinated, the, the, the threat is less.
But are you using remote working more than you were previously?
Am I? Yes, I think I am, but probably not less or I'm travelling much less.
I'm travelling much less. I'm glad of that for all kinds of reasons, not least the environment.
And I'm just thrilled at what what a world has been opened up to us by virtue of teams and all of Zoom and all of these other programmes.
And I work at home a bit more than I used to, but I still am.
And I come into the office because I like the sociability of it, I like I like the structure of it.
But I think there is a kind of I appreciate the flexibility introduced really by how we got our technology right.
Or almost right during COVID. So I am the effect goes on, I think and that is my final question.
Has the experience of working through and working on issues related to the pandemic changed your attitude or your approach to what you do?
And it's made me more convinced that I was right about a lot of things,
that I am right that people who can't take care of themselves are downgraded and that we
can't rely on government or public institutions or private institutions or whatever.
We have to keep us as academics, as researchers.
We have to keep talking about this. We have to keep making it public.
So I think it has it has made me more sensitive, I suppose, underwear, but I think I had that sensitivity all the time.
I'm just more convinced now that also when I see the post-COVID world, I don't think it's changed, actually.
And this is what we find when we look at what's happened on children.
In fact, some of the good things that were done with and for children prior to COVID 19, like hearing their voices, consulting them about a lot more.
Those things haven't come back in the volume you would like, really.
And equally, I think maybe the same is true for people in care homes.
We never actually heard their voices, really. We did hear the voices of their relatives and that was a very good development, I think.
And they are still speaking, which is great. But I still feel the silences have even increased in some respects following COVID.
We're not back to where we were, I think, on the good things.
Great. Thank you very much.