Businesses will give up if there is no sign of an end to this nightmare

The greatest coronavirus challenge is yet to come, and mass testing is the best way to prepare for it

Even though most of us are cloistered in our homes, we know that many extraordinary and inspirational feats are taking place around us. Once the Government communicated to the public the enormity of the crisis we are facing, the people of this country responded with overwhelming support, understanding and innovation.

Whether it be the 20,000 former health professionals who have returned to work, the three quarters of a million people who have volunteered to help, or the thousands of small shops running essential supplies to older households, there has been a vast outpouring of altruism, selfsacrifice and collective concern. It is fortifying to know that these qualities are still latent in the fragmented individualism of modern society.

Equally encouraging is the speed and skill of thousands of engineers and scientists working around the clock to produce the innovations and equipment we all need. Medical laboratories are working frantically to design vaccines and anti-viral drugs, new testing kits will soon roll off production lines in their millions, and manufacturers and brilliant students are inventing new ways to save lives.

The machinery of government has itself been mobilised for drastic action. Yes, there has been criticism of the delays in getting protective equipment and testing to health workers, but this is common to almost all Western countries caught unprepared for a serious pandemic. Soon, there will be several new emergency hospitals with thousands of beds, and new regional structures that coordinate all aspects of the crisis response.

All credit to Boris Johnson for manfully continuing to communicate with the country despite being sick, and for being clear that things will get much worse before they get better. Announcements by the Chancellor have been radical and effective. Ministers and senior officials are doing a good job in unique circumstances, bedevilled by exhaustion, illness and the simultaneous need to adapt to new ways of holding meetings and making decisions.

Yet they must know that their biggest challenge is yet to come. Taking the country into extraordinary measures, winning acceptance for them and mass participation in them has been the task up to now. But more difficult still will be the way out. And it will not be long before millions of businesses and most of the country will want to know what that is.

So far, preparing the population for a long haul has been the right thing to do. When Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, said that a “normal way of living” might be six months away, she was being consistent with that and giving her true professional opinion. Soon, however, such statements will not be enough. Any successful mitigation of the loss of jobs and livelihoods will require, in the fairly near future, some hope that there is a plan for the next stage.

Think of a high street restaurant or café, forced to close for the foreseeable future. It will receive exceptional assistance, in the form of relief from business rates and 80 per cent of staff wages being paid by the Treasury. But with no income at all, it will soon need to make use of the loan scheme the Government has also introduced. The owner, who has probably spent years trying to build a viable business, might well think that a small loan to tide them over for a couple of months is manageable. But when they hear that it might be six months, they may well choose to abandon the business now rather than take on so much debt.

We do not yet know enough about Covid-19 to be sure when current measures can be relaxed. But we know enough about people to be confident that, before April is out, they will need to be told what we are going to do next and when we are going to do it. Having some increasing hope, some rising certainty, some end in sight, will be crucial in preserving millions of jobs.

This is where we must return to the argument for a national system of mass testing in the future, backed by the enforced quarantining of infected individuals and the comprehensive tracing and isolating of all their recent contacts. It is this approach that has allowed South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore to keep their number of deaths dramatically lower than in European countries while continuing most business and social activity.

The experts advising the Government say that the time for this has already passed, as the virus is at large on a grand scale. But the time for it will come again, when the contagion has been reduced in scale but is still a threat. Of course, we might discover that it becomes unnecessary, because a vaccine becomes available more rapidly than expected, or because we have quietly built up “herd immunity” after all. It would not be wise, however, to bet the country on that.

Later this year, there could easily be a new and sharp division in the world. Some countries will be back in business, their firms recovering and their citizens travelling. That will be because they have adopted a Koreanstyle system. By contrast, there will be other countries where the authorities have little idea who has had the virus, or whether it might re-emerge within their borders at any time. Which side of this division we are on will make the difference between a recession and a depression.

My fellow columnist Juliet Samuel has made a cogent case for the adoption of a full testing and tracing system, based on her own experience of the virus. In the Sunday Telegraph, Jeremy Hunt made the powerful arguments of a long-serving health secretary for the same policy. He has suggested mobilising huge numbers of local government officials and those civil servants on non-covid duties to prepare a robust national system for contact-tracing. It is worth listening to him. By preparing for this now, a way out of the lockdown can be made more certain.

In any crisis, the most difficult task for the people at the top is to spend time on the next phase. It would be worth designating a senior minister, free from the mass of unavoidable daily decisions, to design, plan and implement the massive and compulsory system we might need. Getting through the next few weeks is a phenomenal test of the Government and the country. But what happens next will be a bigger one.