UK Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance:

"The UK has actually done a good job of contact tracing and isolating, so the first phase of this means we're a little bit behind compared with where the outbreak is for others. The [next] measures that we're announced, which is about self-isolation even if you've got very mild symptoms, will mean a large number of people actually at home being isolated. That's a very big measure actually, with quite a big impact across a number of households and a number of people, so not a trivial measure, and all the modelling suggests that these sorts of measures are the ones that have the biggest impact.

It is the case, of course, that if you completely locked down absolutely everything, probably for a period of four months or more, then you would suppress this virus. However, all of the evidence from previous epidemics suggests that if you do that, then when you release it, it all comes back again. So the other part of this is to make sure that we don't end up with a sudden peak again in the winter, which is even larger, which causes even more problems. We do face the prospect of an increasing number of people dying. That is a real prospect. For most people however, it's a mild disease."