Sadly, our Treasury officials—and all those politicians, with their Oxford PPE degrees—have read too much economics.

Standard economics textbooks explain the economy as a vast machine. They imply that you can switch it off, then switch it back on again, and it will spring back into life.

In reality, the economy is more like an ecosystem. Remember when Chairman Mao mobilized China’s citizens to kill all the sparrows because they were eating the grain?

A plague of insects that ate the crops instead, with no birdlife around to keep down their numbers. And people starved.

Here, we shut down cafes, bars and restaurants. That hit wholesale suppliers, who had to scramble round to find new, domestic, customers. The closures led to lower footfall in towns, and within days the other shops threw in the towel. Their suppliers too are now facing disaster, as are the companies who rent offices and shops to businesses that may never open again.

Once you disrupt the hugely integrated ecosystem of markets like that, things go out of kilter very fast. Health bosses might say we need to lock down for six or nine months, but by then there will be no businesses standing to generate wealth for healthcare anyway. We need to re-open Britain: safely, but as rapidly as we possibly can.