As it happened: Spain eases curbs on children as daily toll drops - BBC News
Children in Spain under the age of 14 can go outside for the first time in six weeks.
The UK went into lockdown to prevent the NHS becoming overloaded Image caption: The UK went into lockdown to prevent the NHS becoming overloaded

Lockdown was an emergency stop - the only immediately available measure to put the brakes on a virus that outpaced our ability to contain it.

And it has worked. The best estimates are that the rate of infection in the UK is now at a point where the number of new infections is decreasing. To keep it there, though, the next step has to be a very careful one.

Prof Neil Ferguson, one of the government’s key scientific advisers, explained in a podcast called UnHerd how taking the brakes off too abruptly would drive that infection rate back up and cost thousands more lives.

What he and other scientists will do now is create models of different scenarios as we enter a new lockdown phase.

With the best data they have on this very new disease, they will calculate the impact - on that all-important infection rate - of reopening schools, of easing travel restrictions and of opening up certain types of businesses.

The post-lockdown restrictions on our lives - and there will be many - will be guided by those careful calculations.

But it will be down to the government to weigh the risks and the benefits and to tell us what the next phase in our “new normality” will look like.