Johnson: 'We are winning but we haven't won'

The nutshell of the PM's first public statement since being hospitalised with Covid-19 is:

1) We have succeeded in suppressing the rate of spread [transmission] of the virus to a level where it is almost safe to modify restrictions on our most basic freedoms to see who we want and when we want;

2) He cannot tell us how rapidly we will get those freedoms back or even tell us when this new phase of viral containment will start;

3) Johnson will share emerging thinking in coming days on what easing the lockdown may look like, to build a consensus around those modifications;

4) His greatest fear is that there would be second surge in the epidemic, a devastating second peak, if lockdown measures are eased prematurely and recklessly;

5) Johnson measures the success of his policy by one simple metric, namely that the NHS has not collapsed (and he conspicuously pointed to how Italy's health service struggled to cope);

6) He conspicuously failed in any way to address the other "metrics" that would put the government's approach in a much less positive light, namely that the death toll in the UK is amongst the highest in the world, NHS staff and other healthcare workers have not had the protective clothing and equipment they would expect, the government could have increased testing, tracking and tracing capacity weeks earlier than the current timetable, and care homes are perceived to have been woefully under-protected.