The coronavirus pandemic has brought on challenges and struggles for everyone. It has affected almost every aspect of life and every section of society, albeit some more than others.

And now, more than a month into the nationwide lockdown, the true scale of the economic cost of the outbreak is becoming apparent.

One place where the cost of the outbreak is being borne in a particularly acute manner is the coffers of local authorities.

Cumbria County Council is one local authority that is truly feeling the weight of the cost coronavirus is bringing.

The local authority, which is deeply involved in county’s response to coronavirus, was last week told it would receive £25.2m in funding from Westminster to help it cover the costs of battling the coronavirus outbreak.

But immediately following the announcement, the council’s deputy leader Peter Thornton expressed his disappointment at the figure, stressing that this figure came nowhere near enough to the total cost the council will have ended up shouldering once the crisis is over.

One striking example of just how massive the cost of the coronavirus response is for the county council is the cost of personal protective equipment (PPE) that it is now having to shoulder.

Late last year, the county council signed a contract with three suppliers to provide it with PPE for two years. The total cost of the contract was £750,000.

Now, the county council is paying close to that figure every month.

“The current cost is around £600,000 to £650,000 per month, for the next few months we’re estimating,” deputy leader Mr Thornton, also a Liberal Democrat councillor, said.

“We’re distributing in the region of 15,000 surgical masks a day to our staff, and to social care providers who have not been able to source their own.”

Mr Thornton explained that the county council is receiving stocks of PPE directly from central Government – but that they are not providing enough to cover what the council and its care homes and care providers need.

He explained that part of the problem is that the council is not able to buy in bulk.

“In normal times, you do deals; you order in bulk in exchange for a discount,” he said.

“Now, that’s not happening.”

With PPE in short supply given the global need for protective equipment, the county council is having to buy it wherever it can.

“Because we are having to get it from all over the place, frankly, we’re having to overpay what we would normally pay,” Mr Thornton said.

Communities secretary Robert Jenrick has repeatedly reassured local authorities that they will receive the funds they need to respond to the coronavirus crisis.

In a speech on Wednesday, he said: “We’ve provided local authorities with over £3.2 billion during this pandemic so that they can continue to support the communities that need it through this most challenging time and respond to the immediate pressures they are facing due to coronavirus.”

Mr Thornton, however, is concerned that the parameters within which central Government will recognise the costs needed to be reimbursed is changing.

“Government keep reasserting that they will cover Covid-19 costs,” he said.

“But they keep narrowing the basis on reimbursing those costs.”

Mr Thornton added that a discussion of the financial burden shouldered by local authorities throughout the outbreak cannot happen without an acknowledgement of the context of existing budget pressures faced by local government across the country.

“Councils were thinly stretched before this crisis,” he said.

“We were estimating that by the end of the year we would be just about able to balance our budget, providing we were careful. This outbreak has blown that out of the water.”

The focus on saving lives rather than making savings wherever possible means that local authorities like Cumbria County Council are not able to apply the usual stringent cost-saving philosophy adhered to in normal times.

“If an officer is going to go past a budget line, there’s a process by which they come back and explain the overspend, then there’s a process of judging it,” Mr Thornton said.

“Because of the immediacy of the crisis, there isn’t time to painstakingly assess every cost.”

And just like any business, the county council is facing the reality of coping with its loss of income as a result of the lockdown.

One example Mr Thornton used was the council’s parking enforcement team – the costs are still there, but the income for now has gone.

“In normal times, we don’t make a profit or a loss on our parking enforcement – the service pretty much pays for itself.

“But now, we are still paying the wages of those staff but we’re not getting any tickets in.

These losses are, compared to the losses experienced by some in the private sector, modest.

But for the council these losses mean a lot more.

“All of this could derail everything,” Mr Thornton said.

As the country begins to look to the prospect of the lockdown being relaxed, given the slowing rates of death from coronavirus, authorities will begin to prepare for the “contact tracing” stage, in which any new outbreaks will trigger in-depth investigations from officials into who could have come into contact with a new coronavirus patient.

Local authorities will undoubtedly have a role to play in this next phase.

Colin Cox, Cumbria’s director of public health, explained the process.

“You break the chain of the infection by identifying contacts of people who have got it.

"Isolate them and test them, and make sure they’re negative before letting them out of isolation.

“We’ve got people in Cumbria who are very experienced at contact tracing. It’s something environmental health staff do all the time when you’ve got salmonella outbreaks for example.”

However, in order for such an operation to take place on the scale required of the coronavirus outbreak, the county council is going to need help from central Government, Peter Thornton says.

“We simply cannot do contact tracing without resources being put into it – we haven’t got any spare resources whatsoever,” he said.

“If Government are going to pass the buck, they’re going to have to provide the bucks.”