Image copyright EPA

It's just over a month since a senior member of the cabinet told me: "The government is about to involve itself in the lives of millions of people in ways we haven't seen since the war."

And that was before measures were introduced that confined most of us to life within four walls, before the government closed down most of the economy, before the Treasury decided that taxpayers will have to pay millions of people's wages for a few months.

It was before we knew more than a million people would join the benefit system in a couple of short weeks to make ends meet, and before the NHS showed that it could build hospitals in a matter of days.

But it was also before concerns emerged from medics that they didn't have the kit to protect them from the virus, before the real agony about what could happen behind closed doors in care homes emerged.

And it was before the way the UK, in comparison to some other countries, took time to crank up a system to test for the disease - not just to track its progress, but to make it possible for people, particularly NHS staff who have had symptoms, to get back to work.

It was also before the prime minister himself ended up in intensive care, surviving his bout with coronavirus.

And, most importantly, of course, it was before many thousands of people had become victims of the disease.

On the day of that cabinet meeting on 17 March - the last when life was perhaps relatively normal - just 71 people had died in hospital of the virus.

Today, that toll hit 16,509.

We still don't know when or how the pandemic will come to an end. And the government is confident at the moment that they have a remarkable level of broad public support for the measures that they have taken.

As we have discussed here before, it will be a long time - perhaps years rather than months - before a reasoned consensus can be reached about which countries took the best approaches to this and which made the most egregious mistakes.

Across the board, our politicians seem to agree with that.

But you can feel more broadly that the political mood is becoming more scratchy.

Image copyright PA Media Image caption The government has prioritised testing for hospital patients and NHS workers

The opposition parties, while supportive of the lockdown measures, are becoming less patient with the government's explanations of what is also going wrong.

Parliament will return, courtesy of video calling, for some limited meetings this week, which will provide more scrutiny of what ministers are doing.

The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, even suggested Boris Johnson's stand in, Dominic Raab, was "reluctant" to take decisions, leaving the government in a kind of limbo while the prime minister recuperates.

Every day, as the state's massive machine confronts this crisis, problems are evident, especially in a couple of particular areas.

There are plenty of agonising cases - for example, there was an urgent public appeal a few days ago from a big hospital trust in Wolverhampton, asking for donations of things as basic as wipes, hand gel and scrubs.

In just one of many heart-breaking emails, there was a desperate message from the daughter of a 93-year-old in a care home in Yorkshire where some residents have Covid-19 symptoms but no one has been tested, and the manager has not been able to get PPE for the staff.

The family fears the government has no real idea of what's going, says it's a "travesty", and fear their elderly mother is "in danger and no one can help".

Or then there's the father of an A&E doctor in East Anglia, who had already sent his son some goggles and masks to try to keep him safe when there wasn't enough PPE in the hospital.

Now he's frustrated that his son is off work with symptoms, rather than on the wards, and had been told that tests are only being given to NHS staff in "exceptional circumstances".

In our vast health system, there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence of pressure and concern.

Inside government, there is now a private acknowledgement that their initial responses to some of the crisis' demands were too slow.

On PPE, testing, and finding ventilators, one official admits: "On all of this we should have probably moved about two weeks earlier than we did."

Senior figures concede concerns about protective equipment are valid, but point to an "explosion in demand" around the world in their defence.

The health system struggled to get the stocks it already held in case of a pandemic to the right places fast enough, and those reserves did not include medical gowns needed in this situation.

Now the UK is bidding against other countries internationally, and trying to turn on domestic production.

The saga of the plane from Turkey that may or may not be on its way to the UK with tonnes of kit is an unfortunate metaphor for the problems the government has had.

On testing, one NHS leader is much more scathing, suggesting there were "too many cooks spoiling the broth", with several different government departments and agencies involved, and "no-one able to bring proper coordination and control" until the paltry numbers reported day after day "forced a crisis".

One former Tory minister says the Department of Health and Social Care had suffered from a "lack of the right skilled commercial people, a lack of risk appetite, a huge bureaucracy and a tick box culture".

Another former health minister believes the changes made by the coalition government to the NHS by the-then Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, have been part of the problem too.

The concept of those controversial changes was to take day-to-day management of the NHS out of the hands of ministers.

In a crisis like this, for some involved, that has made things even harder, with one official describing the NHS like a "black box that you can't peer into" - suggesting the government has "full accountability but little visibility" of what is being done.

The government is still far off hitting its target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of this month, although capacity has been increasing.

And while there is hardly much time left to hit that stretching target, at senior levels of government even the 100,000 is considered a springboard to a much, much bigger level of testing in time - perhaps even half a million a day - that will be needed to manage our way out of lockdown in the longer term.

While ministers do not want to have a scrap over the debate about the longer term in public, the question of how we move out of these extraordinary circumstances is being raised across government beyond frantic efforts to get on top of the day-to-day problems.

And those discussions can take place because ministers believe they have achieved the two biggest goals they set out at the start of all of this - to slow the spread of the disease, flattening the curve, and to stop the NHS from being completely overwhelmed.

Of course, in an event on this scale, ministers believe, there would be some problems.

But in those two vital regards, they have achieved what they wanted to do. And not so long ago, it wasn't certain that either of those outcomes would be achieved.

Given that the numbers have been flattening, there is, of course, increasing demand - inside and outside government and from the opposition - for plans for a world out of lockdown to be made.

But despite lots of frantic speculation, nothing seems to be fixed, either the "when" or the "how".

Ministers are anxious not to prejudge the recommendations that will come from the government's science experts, the SAGE committee, and they are eager not to send any mixed messages to the public.

One cabinet minister acknowledged that his department was making plans, but they would have to insert a start date later, suggesting they will end up with a "plan about a plan".

Another told me: "We have to make sure the economy is brought back online as soon as it is safe to do so, because the job of recovery is more difficult than bringing us into this in the first place."

And, as you would expect, the Treasury in particular is keen to know how fast the economy could open up again.

But in this uncertain picture, the government wants to pursue caution.

The infection rate - the magic 'R' number of the average number of people someone with the virus will pass it on to - is now under one.

But sources suggest it is still nearer one than zero, and until that flips, the government will be reluctant to take the risk of a second deadly spike.

Lifting restrictions

From the prime minister down, ministers don't want to take a chance of another wave of infection they'd struggle to contain.

That settling of the rate may happen in time for the next review of lockdown in three weeks, but that just isn't guaranteed.

And it's is also plain that even once we reach that moment, the measures that have constrained all of our lives will end gradually, one restriction lifted or altered after another.

It's even possible that some of the measures might be turned off and on to see what happens, rather than disappearing in strict order, one by one.

Just as the spread of coronavirus accelerated in a way that few in Whitehall expected, so the situation could still evolve in unexpected ways in the next few weeks.

The risk of a pandemic was, for a long time, high on the list of the problems UK governments would have to grapple with.

But even more than a month in to the crisis, no one can be sure what reality will bring.