Robert Peston

Thursday's meeting of the emergency Cobra committee that takes decisions on how to protect us from the ravages of Covid-19 was supposed to be a 15-minute formality, to rubber-stamp a decision, to make no decision at all on when and whether to ease these unprecedented on our freedoms. But because the telecoms connections for this video conference call were ropey and the ministers chaired by the First Secretary of State Dominic Raab struggled to be understood, the 15 minutes extended to a frustrating 45 minutes. Even so, ministers did decide to mandate the government's scientists, on the so-called SAGE committee, to gather the data necessary to inform a political decision on how and when to return our way of life to something that feels a bit more like normal.

I had been puzzling about why for most of the past 12 days, until last night, the PM and his advisers had been insisting - in tweets, short videos and statements - that he was still running the show, in spite of the evidence that he was seriously and worryingly under the weather. The answer, which is conspicuous this morning, is that although Dominic Raab has been asked by the PM to deputise for him when chairing important committees, including Cabinet, he is not 'in charge', in the way that a PM appointed by HM the Queen (and a Tory leader elected by Tory MPs and party members) would always be. It is not his fault, but he has no proper mandate. This absence of a conventional leader of the nation is complicated and concerning for two reasons.

At the daily press briefings of senior ministers, the medical and the scientific advisers, there is a reluctance to talk about a timescale for an 'exit strategy' from these unprecedentedly severe restrictions on our freedom to move around and see people - and even to discuss what that strategy might look like. The understandable priority is to get us to commit wholeheartedly to the surrender of these basic rights so that the incidence of the virus can be slashed and many lives can be saved. Among the senior medical and scientific advisers, who seem to be steering pretty much everything right now, any initiatives that aren't about immediate virus suppression are deemed a potentially harmful luxury.

There is some fascinating language in last night's press release from HM Treasury that modifies the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan (CBIL) Scheme. It says lenders are 'banned from requesting personal guarantees on loans under £250,000'. Hmmm. This is – to put it mildly – a bit disingenuous, though politically expedient, bank bashing, because it implies it was the banks which wanted borrowers from the CBIL emergency scheme to pledge their business premises and any assets (other than the primary residence) as security against the loan.

I have uncovered another troubling potential roadblock to increasing the volume of tests for Covid-19. It is all quite complicated, so please bear with me. What I have learned is that just under two weeks ago, the Government paid several million pounds to purchase two million 'rapid lateral flow diagnostic test' kits from China, with one million coming from a company called Wondfo and one million from AllTest. Both of these tests have EU approval for use by medical practitioners. They can be deployed and used in hospitals in the UK right now. Of these tests kits, one million – the ones made by Wondfo, which also have Chinese FDA approval – are scheduled to arrive in the UK in the coming week.

My jaw slightly dropped on Friday when Michael Gove announced that the number of Covid-19 cases in the UK was now doubling every three to four days. This is significantly faster than the five days that was initially built into the government's forecasts for the rate of increase in sufferers, and the 4.3 days that epidemiologist Neil Ferguson told me on 17 March was the new estimated ‘baseline’ doubling time. On the one hand, this accelerated rate of infection explains why the government moved to enforce much more severe measures to restrict social interaction just over a week ago, because presumably its scientific advisers had more than an inkling that the virus was spreading significantly faster than would allow hospitals to cope.

There are still potentially lethal ambiguities in the government's coronavirus advice about who should go to work; such is the judgement of leading employers, to whom I've spoken. The fundamental question is whether businesses that are not doing work considered of national importance, but which involve employees working cheek by jowl in sweaty conditions, should cease operating. The head of one of the UK's largest companies is absolutely clear to me that the government has given a signal that such operations should send staff home and switch off the machines.

Very few of us alive thought we would ever hear a prime minister of the United Kingdom, with its centuries old liberties, order us to stay in our homes, and only venture out, and never in groups, to acquire what we need to stay alive or for basic essential exercise – on pain if we disobey of being arrested and fined by the police. His reason, that won't have escaped you (I hope), is rarely in our history have we faced such a threat to the lives of those we hold most precious as that posed by Covid19. And never in its 72-year existence has the NHS teetered so precariously close to collapse, because of the demands it faces from those with the virus who are struggling for air.

We are relying on courageous NHS staff to help us through this terrible Covid-19 crisis. So many would say we have a duty to listen to their concerns and anxieties. And as you will be aware, and as the chief executive of St George's University Hospital's Jac Totterdell has made explicit, lots of doctors and nurses do not feel that they are being given the appropriate protective clothing. A leading consultant has explained the issue to me. It is probably best if I just use the consultant's own words. 'All we get are little plastic aprons that don’t cover your arms or neck or back or lower legs. And no facial protection, yet patients are coughing all over you. 'Then you walk through the hospital covered in (the) bug. Which as we know can live for days on surfaces...

It's very interesting, and important, that the Bank of England is encouraging banks to turn half a blind eye to likely coronavirus losses on loans to businesses and mortgage borrowers – in the hope that banks don’t suddenly stop lending for fear future losses will deplete their capital. After the 2008 banking crisis, this is something I never thought I would see, but it's probably an appropriate measure. Given the sheer number of businesses and mortgage-borrowers in trouble, the damage to the economy would be made much worse if banks stopped or cut lending for prudential reasons. What matters is that the Bank had better be right that the economy and businesses will bounce back when we are through this Covid-19 crisis.

The announcement today by Boris Johnson that we are gearing up Covid-19 testing from 5,000 a day, to 10,000, to 25,000 to 250,000, and the endorsement from the government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance that this could theoretically happen in weeks, was the most important Covid-19 announcement on Thursday. Many in the NHS and in the wider scientific community see this as a shift in policy that should have come earlier. But few doubt its importance in saving lives by making social distancing more effective because it is more accurately targeted. And it creates the possibility of an earlier return to something for all of us that would feel a bit more like normal life.

There was widespread anxiety and concern that the Government was basing its measures to suppress spread of coronavirus on an assumption that the numbers infected were doubling every five days, when the evidence here and internationally suggested a doubling rate of nearer four days. I raised this concern with Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College expert whose forecasting has underpinned the Government's accelerated moves to constrain our freedom of movement. He told me: 'I misspoke when I said five days.' His baseline for the spread rate (R0) is that each sufferer would infect 2.4 people on average (technically: R0 = 2.4) which implies that the numbers infected would double every 4.3 days, in line with the international data. If R0 turns out to be 2.

People over 70 will be instructed by the government to stay in strict isolation at home or in care homes for four months, under a 'wartime-style' mobilisation effort by the government likely to be enforced within the next 20 days. It is part of a series of measures being prepared by the prime minister, health secretary, chief medical officer and chief scientific adviser to prevent the health service from 'falling over' and to save lives as coronavirus, Covid-19, becomes an epidemic in the UK.

As I have repeatedly mentioned, the view of the chief medical officer Chris Whitty, which has shaped the Government’s response to Covid-19, is that the virus is the equivalent of unstoppable bad flu. But to make policy on that basis is to impose an epidemiological judgement on what is a social, ethical and political issue. The fact is that for most British people, 20,000 people or so dying each year from flu is just one of those horrible facts of nature. But that does not mean all, or any of us, will or should accept as a fait accompli that 100,000 or more have to die so that we can acquire the “herd immunity” I cited earlier today, as the Government’s goal.