The pressure is growing. The calls are mounting. And there is only one question: when will the UK's lockdown end? It is, for all of us, a hugely pertinent question. Life is stuck on pause. Millions are out of work. But the curve, mercifully, is flattening. And so, every day, the government holds its coronavirus press briefing. And every day the same question is asked: when will the lockdown end? It is the obvious question to ask; it is also the wrong question to ask.

The coronavirus pandemic is such a big story that all other stories have collapsed into it. There is too much news, but also there is no news. Westminster, normally rollicking with infighting and backstabbing, is a ghost town. Our political machine has been reduced to muddled Zoom calls. The House of Lords is stuck on mute. Our towns and cities are deserted, the normal thrum of existence reduced to a horrifying daily death toll. And talk of the curve.

As Boris Johnson returned to Downing Street, there was hope that the impasse would end. Instead, Johnson repeated the same line: it is too early to lift the lockdown, end of discussion. All eyes have now shifted to the next lockdown review on May 7 – the day when something, anything might happen. In reality, we are likely to find ourselves kicking the can down the road for many more weeks. The news industry isn’t used to this kind of situation, when a story is so big that the sheer gravity of it pulls the world around it to a standstill. At present, all questions are essentially stonewalled by the daily death rate and a brief PowerPoint presentation by an exhausted-looking public health official.

Asking when the lockdown will end now is akin to waking up on December 10 and asking why it isn’t Christmas Day tomorrow. The time has not arrived, not by a long shot. Politicians cannot publicly discuss what comes next because doing so reveals an uncomfortable truth: what comes next is very far away. And, when it arrives, the end of lockdown is likely to feel like a whimper rather than a great relief. In our fight against Johnson’s “unexpected and invisible mugger”, we have just realised we no longer know how to throw a punch.

In dodging the tired question of when the lockdown will end, ministers have repeated the same mantra: “we will be guided by the science”. This handy phrase has allowed officials to bat away questions that are, for now, impossible to answer. It’s also given them a way of sucking almost all the oxygen out of the political debate. Right now, the politics is hiding behind the science. But, with each passing day, it is oozing out. As BuzzFeed reports, members of the Sage advisory group are concerned ministers would use scientists as “human shields” to insulate themselves from blame. As a consequence, our news cycle finds itself stuck between a lockdown that won’t shift and a political story that is mostly devoid of politics. Meanwhile, a recent YouGov poll found that 91 per cent of people backed the extension announced on April 16.

Stuck in limbo, the news is going about the strange process of making its own news. As Charlie Brooker explained in an episode of Newswipe back in 2010, the news is a strange creature – especially when presented with a story that stubbornly won’t move. Because, right now, it can’t. The mounting calls are from journalists. The growing pressure is from one outlet reporting on the mounting calls of another. The next day, this wave of mounting calls and growing pressure is the subject of interviews with experts – economists, behavioural scientists, epidemiologists – who, much as the government is doing, often point out it is too early to talk about lifting the lockdown. Ask when the lockdown will end often enough, and fail to get an answer enough times, and you suddenly have a story bouncing around the void.

But asking “when” is unlikely to force politicians to address the “why”. To date, all that has been achieved is the acting out of a tired piece of political theatre in a playhouse that is currently closed. So why can’t the UK lift its lockdown? Not just today, not just on May 7, but potentially for many more weeks to come? To answer that question you have to understand one simple truth: even if the curve had been fully squashed today, the UK would be in no position to ease even the smallest of lockdown restrictions. And that’s because the second the lockdown is eased, we will be flying blind.

Back on March 16, World Health Organisation head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made his view on how to control the spread of coronavirus clear: “test, test, test”. Germany is currently testing 350,000 people a week and has capacity for double that number. In France, public health officials have explained that the current testing capacity of 150,000 will need to reach 500,000 in order to fully track and control the spread of the virus. The UK, which has set itself the seemingly imaginary target of testing 100,000 people per day, is currently at a little over 30,000. The purgatory we now find ourselves in – where the peak has passed but the lockdown remains in place – is a result of this simple arithmetic.

As we gaze out from our island prison, which is currently responsible for ten per cent of global coronavirus deaths, we see other countries easing their lockdown restrictions. From Germany to New Zealand and the Czech Republic to Italy, much of the world is, tentatively, leaving lockdown. While the methods of lifting the lockdowns varies, the rationale is consistent: widespread testing, a massive contact tracing system and very low rates of hospital admissions. As a result of past decisions, the UK remains some way behind many countries in tackling coronavirus both in terms of the current rate of hospitlisation but also in terms of how well it can control the spread of the virus once lockdown measures are eased.

Which brings us back to the question of when the lockdown will end. Without enough tests, without enough trained contact tracers and without a viable contact tracing app, the UK is stuck. The lockdown will not end – it cannot end. This is why the government keeps on stonewalling the question. Because, right now, it cannot be answered. It is not that officials in the UK are more scared of a second wave, it is that the UK is less prepared and more vulnerable. We are being guided by the science but governed, quite rightly, by fear.

James Temperton is WIRED's digital editor. He tweets from @jtemperton

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK