LONDON, U.K. -- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has just announced, with a heavy heart, that his nation got a little too relaxed over the summer, and must now pay for it.

Starting next week, six is the maximum number of people who can get together, whether it’s indoors or outdoors, in pubs, parks, private homes or restaurants—with the very real prospect of “COVID marshals” patrolling English towns and cities to make sure people comply.

As a friend wrote this morning, one of the seven dwarfs is not going to be happy.

Johnson had spent weeks urging people to go back to their offices, to patronize restaurants—“Eat Out to Help Out”—to stop in for a pint at their local pub and send their kids back to school.

With coronavirus infections surging, he has now slammed on the brakes, before the situation gets out of hand and a wider lockdown becomes necessary.

For a prime minister normally full of upbeat, blokey cheeriness, amid moments of puffery, he told the British people how much pain this decision caused him: “It breaks my heart.”

Perhaps he was thinking ahead to the next three months and the possibility that Christmas may be cancelled.

When England’s chief medical officer was asked how long this restriction on gatherings would be needed, he was vague and perhaps wisely so. Who wants to be the Grinch in September?

The bigger revelation is the prime minister’s mega plan to increase virus testing on a massive scale as the only way to avoid a second national lockdown. Make that mammoth testing.

Code name: Operation Moonshot.

The boggling goal is to deliver 10 million tests a day with results available in mere minutes. And all of this would happen by early 2021—using technology that doesn’t exist yet.

Moonshot, long shot.

Some people are naturally skeptical. Okay maybe a lot of people. Cries of nonsense ricocheted around Twitter. One prominent British scientist called it “waste/corruption on a cosmic scale.”

Right now the U.K. is barely able to deliver 300,000 tests a day without a struggle. How about ten million?

Consider the story of a London architect who was told to get tested, but when he tried to make a booking, he was directed to Inverness in Scotland, 725 kilometres away.

It’s also been pointed out that Johnson is the prime minister who promised a “world beating” phone app that would track and trace infections better than anywhere else on the planet. It flopped.

Various dictionaries define moonshot as an extremely ambitious project, meant to achieve a monumental goal, often with little expectation of success.

The prime minister likes the word. He once used it to describe a project for curing dementia.

No risk, no glory, as they say.