We are at war with coronavirus. Everyone will have to muck in | Gaby Hinsliff

This pandemic will open up sinkholes in society - volunteers may have to help out in services from deliveries to education

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Nous sommes en guerre: we are at war. With those words, President Macron put France on notice yesterday that everything had changed, promising hundreds of billions of euros to ensure that no business would go bust because of the virus.

Yet here in Britain, where the government has only just realised that its strategy of keeping calm and carrying on is no longer sustainable, we're scrabbling to catch up. Boris Johnson raised more questions than answers with Monday's instructions to start social distancing with a vengeance: how are all those people whose jobs effectively vanished overnight, when the nation was told to avoid pubs and clubs and restaurants and theatres, supposed to live? What about the next wave of businesses that will be hit - in manufacturing as factories start shutting down, in shops and services that sell anything that people don't actively need in order to stay at home? The hospitality trade is already warning it will be wiped out without state assistance (ministers didn't actually order them to close, merely telling their customers to stay away, therefore many won't be able to claim on insurance). We don't even have answers yet on how people working freelance or in the gig economy are supposed to cope, and already the crisis is moving on to those in supposedly secure jobs.