I had an uncomfortable moment recently. I realised that I was instinctively treating the UK’s response to coronavirus as sort of a score in a game: we’re doing better than X but not as well as Y, and that implicitly I wanted Y to start doing worse, so that we could overtake them. I had mentally begun to think of it as a league table, in which we can win or lose.

For the record: I don’t know how well we’re doing, in that league table. The brilliant people at Our World In Data — an absolutely vital source for trustworthy information, at any time but especially now — say that by one important measure, testing, we’re doing a reasonable job: as of two days ago we’d tested 50,000 people, less than only China, South Korea, Italy, the UAE and Russia. Per capita it’s not quite so good — various Nordic countries and Austria and so on jump above us too — but we’re comfortably in the top half of the table. That’s only one metric, though; there are many others. I get the impression that we’re introducing measures at similar sorts of points along our journey to countries such as France.

But the point is that this is not graded on a curve. How well other countries are doing is only relevant insofar as it shames us to do more; comparing ourselves to France or Spain doesn’t change how many people will be affected here. The fact that the USA is screwing up its response worse than we are does not necessarily mean that we are doing OK.