Britain has been under lockdown for a month. All of our lives have been disrupted by coronavirus, thousands of lives have been lost.

It has brought enormous grief to families up and down the country, it has required enormous sacrifice and engendered great endeavour from those not just trying to save lives, but from the millions of people caring for the elderly, stacking the supermarket shelves and delivering supplies to hospitals and homes.

Finally those efforts are paying off. Hospital deaths from COVID-19 are doubling every 16 days, against the two to three days at the beginning of the lockdown. Hospital admissions are down 10% across the country and 30% in London. The transmission rate (the R number) is now below one, which means a person with the disease is causing less than one new infection.

That means the epidemic is currently in decline – for now.

The epidemic is moving to a new phase and decisions will soon have to be made about how we come out of the lockdown and when.

A global pandemic that has shut down not just the UK but much of the world. Some believe our crisis has been much deeper than it needed to be.

“I think what history will say looking at the course of this pandemic so far is that there was a big difference between the way Asian scientists view this and Western British and American scientists did,” says Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, who now chairs the Health Select Committee.

“In the West we tended to say this is kind of like a very nasty flu and basically there’s nothing you can do to stop the spreading throughout the population, until you get a vaccine. Whereas in Asia they thought, this is a form of SARS, a deadly virus, and it has to be stopped at all costs.”

This was the approach the UK government took until there was a handbrake turn in mid-March when epidemiologists at Imperial College London, whose disease modelling has been feeding into the government’s strategy on handling the virus, concluded that trying to slow the spread of the virus (the mitigation model) rather than trying to reverse the epidemic growth (the suppression model) would overwhelm the NHS.

Demand for intensive care beds would be exceeded eight times over and there could be a quarter of a million deaths.

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