Standing beside Johnson, his two advisers spelled out the reality, telling reporters that it was not simply a question of ordering the country to do whatever seemed safest—the social cost of draconian measures needed to be weighed as well. If schools were closed, for instance, doctors and nurses might have to take time off work to look after their own children, undermining the health service’s ability to cope. If older people are asked to avoid contact with others, how do their families ensure that they do not become socially isolated in the process? And what about the poor? Not everyone can work from home, so the cost of forcing people to do so would not fall equally. Temporary employees paid only for the hours they work would lose far more of their income than those with permanent contracts. Should the lowest-paid people in society really be expected to bear a higher burden for a national plan designed to protect everyone?

Read: The problem with telling sick workers to stay home

An outbreak like the coronavirus reveals the priorities and values of a society, and how long it can cope without the freedoms it’s accustomed to. Here in London, the government acknowledges that its own power is limited, and that it may have only a small window to impose curbs on a population unused to even basic state restrictions.

The first task for governments hoping to lead their countries calmly through the challenge might be to level with the public about this basic fact: that the puzzle of how to respond to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is not solely a scientific one, but a social and political one requiring widespread buy-in.

Take, for instance, a report in The Times of London on the British government’s plans claiming that ministers and officials were “considering the trade-off between allowing an acute outbreak, from which the economy would rebound more quickly, and trying to save more lives by imposing restrictions on mass gatherings and transport.” This is the ugly reality of government. As Stewart Wood, once an adviser to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, put it, such questions are exactly “the kind of grave utilitarian calculus we both absolutely need the crisis-planning part of our Government to be thinking about [and] absolutely need our Government not to discuss.”

In Britain, decisions of life and death are routinely considered by an institution called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, a body of experts that uses scientific evidence and data to evaluate whether medical interventions—operations, scans, drugs, therapies, or anything else—constitute “value for money” and should be made available via the National Health Service. If an intervention is deemed too expensive, even if it has some health benefits, such as prolonging life or easing pain, it will not be made available to the public, because that money can be better spent elsewhere. This is medical rationing by experts: finding the best way to distribute the finite pot of government money allocated for health care.