Boris Johnson must have been relieved that he was hors de combat, as he might put it, last week with coronavirus. It was the week when the fragile truce between the media and the Government finally cracked. On Thursday, after another woolly and inconsequential briefing by ministers, the press turned on the Government as one, condemning the testing “shambles”.

Mind you, the media were pretty woolly themselves at times. The ITV presenter, Robert Peston, was taken to task by Professor Jonathan Van Tam, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, for not understanding the difference between antigen testing and antibody testing. The former, the swab tests that indicate whether you have the disease or not, are not the same as the tests which show whether you have immunity.

My approach throughout this pandemic has been to broadly accept the guidance from the Government medical advisers on the grounds that they actually know what they're talking about. This doesn't mean taking everything the Government says at face value, nor does it mean ignoring contradictions. But it does mean not emulating the instant experts who impute evil political motives to scientists and politicians.

Journalists continue to spend far too much time on Twitter listening to them. We saw this with the row about herd immunity. This is simply the epidemiology of how populations acquire immunity, antibodies, through being exposed to a virus. A bit like the way children acquire immunity to chicken pox at school even though they show no symptoms.

But this was misconstrued as a wicked exercise in social Darwinism, promoted by the madman Dominic Cummings. It was all about letting hundreds of thousands of pensioners die in order to save capitalist profits. Government medical advisers have now stopped talking about herd immunity altogether, which retrospectively lent a spurious credence to the claims that it was a discredited policy.

The real news is that herd immunity is still the policy. It is the only exit strategy for this disease in the absence of a vaccine. As Professor Jason Leitch, the National Clinical Director, has said from the start, the only way that the country will get back to work is if enough people are exposed to the disease and acquire immunity.

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This doesn't mean ending social distancing and “letting the disease rip”. It means controlling exposure. The measures taken by the governments are about slowing the spread of the disease to protect the health service, which was in danger of being overwhelmed.

There is similar confusion about testing, and not just about the different varieties. The Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, Dr Catherine Calderwood, continued to insist last week that testing is a “distraction”. This aroused apoplexy from the instant epidemiologists.

She was saying that unnecessary testing could divert effort and resources from the sick. Just testing people doesn't really tell you very much, except that they don't have the disease today. Doesn't mean they won't get it tomorrow.

In Germany, which everyone cites as the fountainhead of testing, we see the opposite problem. Der Spiegel was quoting leading medical authorities last week saying that they were testing far too many people. Swabs and reagents were being needlessly exhausted testing people who didn't need it.

Testing is necessary for NHS staff of course, and this is where the governments, north and south still have serious questions to answer. It's little comfort that, as Jason Leitch explained last week, only 6% of NHS staff are actually sick with coronavirus. Why, with our vast pharmaceuticals industry, did we have so little diagnostic capacity?

It seems that we have outsourced this in the past to firms like the German-Swiss pharma giant Roche. It unsurprisingly provided the kit to Germany first in a country with a decentralised health service based on the laender governments. It rather looks as if smaller regions and countries like Iceland and Singapore, are able to move quicker than in Britain, with a centralised health system.

The UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, has promised to deliver 100,000 swab antigen tests a day by the end of the month, which is a highly ambitious target. But the antibody test is the real get-out-of-jail-free card, because that would allow people who had acquired immunity to be identified and allowed back to work.

Here, the Government was guilty of creating false expectations. Boris Johnson said on March 19 that hundreds of thousands of these kits, which could be used like pregnancy tests, could be ready within days or weeks. But the Government has tested them and found that most versions don't actually work.

The next "big issue" is going to be face masks. In countries like Slovakia and Austria they are compulsory. America is going the same way, with New York masking up. The pressure will be on the Government to explain why Britain is being left behind.

Leitch insisted last week that there is little to be gained from masks, most of which also don't work, because Covid-19 is not an airborne pathogen. The disease is spread by contact with surfaces, hence the focus on hand washing.

But you can hear the questions already. What about droplets from the mouths of unmasked people? Shouldn't we be stopping these falling onto the surfaces in the first place? Is it because Dominic Cummings wants old people to die?

The biggest issue of all has had relatively little coverage at all, so far: the impact on the economy. My column last week pointing out the dangers of lengthy lockdown was wilfully misconstrued on social media, and by people who should know better, as an appeal to put profits above people's lives.

My purpose was not to question the lockdown – I said quite clearly that I support the Government policy – but to alert people to the fact that unemployment is also lethal. It's not about lives versus profits; it is about lives versus lives.

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We know this. Scotland's health has still not recovered fully from the Thatcherite destruction of manufacturing industry in the 1980s recessions. Working-class communities were devastated. Alcoholism, opioids, mental health, domestic abuse, poor nutrition, sub-standard housing and a multitude of other ill-health resulted.

It's why life expectancy in some parts of Glasgow and west central Scotland is still so low that many men will not live long enough to claim their state pension.

Last week, we learned that 10 million people have lost their jobs in America in the past two weeks alone, and a million people in the UK have signed on – or tried to – for Universal Credit. We hope that this will be temporary. That the Government's measures – the most comprehensive economic support package in peacetime history – will be enough. But the danger of a prolonged recession and even a depression cannot be ignored, as the economist Nouriel Roubini, who forecast the 2008 financial crash, has been warning.

This is a health issue too. It does not mean ending social distancing. Or resorting to a devil-take-the-hindmost version of herd immunity. But it does mean opening our eyes. It may not be very long before the Government is also being accused of killing people through economic negligence.