Initially we had to start off to make sure the test worked, we had to be confident about that and then it was rolled out in stages and continues to be rolled out in stages.

Chris Whitty

It doesn’t take many doublings until we’re in actually quite scary numbers again ... I don’t think we should underestimate the fact that we could get into trouble again surprisingly fast.

In terms of the medium-term, my expectation is that we will get a further winter surge, late autumn/winter surge, and that is because we know that winter and autumn favor respiratory viruses, and therefore it’d be very surprising if this particular highly transmissible respiratory virus was not also favored.

We are confident that the vaccines that are least currently available in the UK work against that, for practical purposes.

The key thing from our point of view is to leave this in the hands of the regulator ... They will make an assessment with lots of data that is not currently in the public domain on efficacy and on safety.

We do not have sufficient testing and this is a global problem because basically every country is wanting this new test, for a disease that wasn't actually being tested for anywhere three months ago, there is a global shortage and that's a bottleneck for us.

This is going to be a close-run thing — we all know that — and anybody who looks around the world can see this is going to be difficult for every health system, we do think that if everybody sticks to staying in your household unless absolutely essential this ... will be probably manageable by the NHS but we cannot guarantee that.