Britain cannot assume it has beaten this virus

The four chief medical officers of the UK still command sufficient respect for the public to trust the latest assessment of the coronavirus threat level.

Moving from 4 to 3 is the first reduction since the system was introduced five weeks ago. After successive failures on ventilators, personal protective equipment, care homes, the timing of the lockdown and the test and trace app, it is welcome news. It reflects a gradual decline in infection levels, the R rate and in intensive care admissions and deaths – though the rate of decline is levelling off, in contrast to comparable countries

such as Germany and France where the rates have fallen further and faster. Nothing can detract from the shameful fact that Britain has one of the worst, if not the worst, record on lives lost to Covid-19 in the developed world.

The lowering of risk level legitimises some of the modest moves made, particularly in England, in relaxing the lockdown, with ministers exploring the very limits of what they could do under the level 4 categorisation. Opening more shops and more schools has effectively been approved – but only provided social distancing is still applied outdoors and indoors, especially the two-metre rule. This is now going to become the focus of intense interest, and it is vital both to public health and to the health of the economy to get this judgement right. The shift to level 3, in other words, does not automatically mean an immediate reduction in the two-metre rule to one and a half metres or even one metre. Perhaps that will arrive soon, but only when level 2 is reached can there be a switch to “minimal social distancing”, an as yet unquantified notion but presumably close to pre-Covid normality.

For now, the two-metre rule and general caution on social distancing remains. This means that still large swathes of life are not going to return to normal. Schools cannot operate practically under such conditions, hence the attempt to plug the learning gap over the summer (assuming normal schooling can resume in September). Without access to the schools or nurseries, many parents can still not return to normal work.

Manufacturing, small retailers, and the entire leisure sector can hardly function economically with the twometre rule, and the same is even more true for barbers, dentists and many others. That, though, is not an argument for scrapping the rule now, if that would threaten a second wave of Covid. The pandemic is far from over, and there is also no guarantee that just by moving the threat level down that it will stay down. There is no ratchet on the threat scale. Public health should stay paramount.

The largest single worry, whatever the formal threat level, is the weakness in the test and trace system. It is late, under-resourced and it looks as if the app will never work. Contact levels are not as strong as they should be. As a consequence local outbreaks cannot be closed down rapidly and controlling the virus at the national level remains challenging.

The nature of this coronavirus means that it can spread exponentially and will spread even quicker as the autumn turns to winter, and colder weather pushes us to congregate inside – ideal conditions for the virus. Meanwhile, despite excellent developments on treatment and some encouraging signals on vaccine development, eradication is remote.

Britain is, in effect, trying to live with Covid-19 at an acceptable level of casualties, on top of the around 60,000 “excess” fatalities estimated so far. There is no cause for celebration.