Will we be back to normal by Christmas? It’s a case of listening to Boris Johnson’s limitless optimism – or the experts

You may be aware by now that the novel coronavirus is a respiratory illness. It passes from person to person principally by close human contact.

And so, it transpires, that having bribed the entire country with four-quid Big Mac meals and then threatened them with redundancy if they don’t go back to the office, coronavirus is on the up again. It’s all your fault and something has to be done.

Just in case anyone was in any doubt that it was A Big Deal, Boris Johnson did one of his Downing Street press conferences, “backed up” which is to say “totally undermined” by his two top scientists.

There were graphs to show that it’s all young people’s fault. Infection rates are soaring among 20 to 29 year olds, none of whom can be trusted not to pass it on to grandma (that’s if she’s lucky enough to still be alive), so all socialising has now been banned.

Indoors, outdoors, whenever, wherever, you can no longer hang out in groups of more than six. This will sort everything out. Kill off the raves and save the world. Of course, you can still go to work. So if you’re say, aged between 20 and 29 and several orders of magnitude more likely to work in retail or hospitality, and just as less likely to be able to have access to a car and therefore need to use public transport to get there, you can carry on going to work, but you do have to stop seeing your friends.

Still, none of this mattered at all, because there’s still “Operation Moonshot” to look forward to. Whenever Johnson is on hand to deliver bad news, which more often than not involves the fact that the previously promised good news turns out not to have been true, there is always a fresh load of good news around to cover it up.

And so operation “moonshot” had another outing. That’s the thing whereby millions of people will take millions of tests every day, allowing us all to go about our lives almost as normal, but for the small, piddling matter that the technology on which Operation Moonshot depends does not, as yet, exist.

How long will all this go on for? Well, ask the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, and you’ll be told the following: “The period between now and spring is going to be difficult. This is not a short term thing.”

Ask Johnson the same, and you’ll get this: “We could be able to get some aspects of our lives back to normal by Christmas with that moonshot of daily testing.”

The fact that this thing is even being called the “moonshot” should be sufficient evidence as to the likelihood of its occurrence. The “world-beating” test and trace app is four months late. It is, I think, five months since Matt Hancock breathlessly announced the smashing of his daily testing target, and mysteriously, here we are, with persistently coughing Londoners being advised to drive themselves and their high temperatures to Inverness to get a test. Do not pass go. Do not walk among the bluebells at Barnard Castle.

It is two months since Johnson was blaming the public for not getting enough tests. Now we are blamed for getting too many. It is truly painful to recall that, in March, the deputy chief medical officer, Jenny Harries really did say that “there comes a point in a pandemic when mass testing is not an appropriate intervention”.

Still, reach for the moon and if you fail you might just land in the stars, as the old saying regularly seen on your mate’s mum’s Facebook wall goes. Of course, you might also end up banjaxed on a zipwire hanging 50ft above a London park, but best not worry about that for now.

So will it all be over by Christmas? Can we pin our hopes on the moonshot? Well Christmas, you may know, is a specific date, 25 December, so you don’t have to read too far between the lines of the following to get a view from the government’s own scientists.

Patrick Vallance: “There are as always unknowns, and we’d be completely wrong to say this is a slam dunk that can definitely happen.”

Or indeed Chris Whitty: “It’s important that what we don’t do is say, ‘By this time this will be achieved’. We have to be absolutely sure these tests work at scale.”

So there you have it then. It’s all your fault for doing as you were told. Now do this, and it’ll still all be over by Christmas, as long as you don’t listen to the man standing right next to me.

Naturally, we hope that’s clear.