The biggest questions that governments in every part of the UK have to answer are these: the lockdown was justified partly as a means to buy time to put the systems (tracktrace/effective small local lockdowns/mass testing etc) in place which would mean we might not need to...

... return to onerous blanket restrictions either nationally or across large swathes of the country. Given such restrictions are returning- what happened to those systems? What effect have they had? Were these the wrong strategies in the first place? And now do we need new ones?

Because though obviously the acute problem of the rising cases is worrying, perhaps the bigger worry is the strategic one: the fact we’re at all and there’s not much sense yet from any politician of how we prevent it again, while we wait for a vaccine, which may never come.

So in short: is it the same strategies but better executed? Or something different?