Chief Minister Howard Quayle returned to the office this week for the first time since he was struck down by coronavirus.

He said he was ’absolutely floored’ by Covid-19 but was able to continue working from home - and after 14 days in self-isolation is now getting his strength back more each day.

His first day back on Tuesday saw him chair a National Strategy Group meeting before going straight into a virtual sitting of Tynwald. Then at the 4pm press briefing that day, he was announcing the first steps being taken to get the Manx economy working again.

Mr Quayle said: ’I hit a wall on the Saturday and spent a day in bed. I had been doing 100 hour-plus weeks for a month now and I thought I was just run down.’

He said he had felt better on the Monday (April 6) and went into work but within an hour or two his temperature had shot up and he went home straight away and got through to [the phone line] 111.

’Two or three people I work with had gone down with it over the weekend and were self-isolating,’ he said.

’I drove up to the testing centre on Tuesday and within half an hour I had been tested and went straight home. I got the result by the week’s end.’

Mr Quayle said he spent the rest of the week in bed, with his temperature going up and down and peaking at 39 degrees. On the Wednesday he developed a tickly cough but he added: ’It’s the high temperature that absolutely drains you.’

He was self-isolating in a separate bedroom and separate bathroom at his home in Braddan and was working from the sun lounge.

The Chief Minister said: ’I wasn’t worried about myself. My wife has an auto-immune condition so is considered high risk. I was more worried about her getting it.’

Mr Quayle’s youngest daughter Elizabeth had been volunteering in ward 1 at Noble’s and while he was keeping away from the hospital he knew given the nature of his job that as a family there was a risk of catching the virus.

’You think you are indestructible but that first week absolutely floored me,’ he said.

His fever broke overnight Friday/ Saturday. He went out to do some gardening but felt ’absolutely wrecked’ after only 10 to 15 minutes. Despite his self-isolation, and being confined to bed for the first week, he only missed one meeting and continued to chair the National Strategy Group and Council of Ministers.

Mr Quayle said the island has done ’phenomenally well’ in controlling the spread of the virus, with the transmission rate falling from 19% to under 7%.

The island was the first in the world to bring in 14-day quarantine on arrivals before even seeing its first case of Covid-19 and is ninth in the world when it comes to the amount of testing that has been carried out. On-island testing, launched this week, will be able carry out 200 tests each day.

’We know where we are in the curve,’ he said, adding the virus would peak around May 7 to 10. H e later told the House of Keys that thanks to the fantastic response of the Manx public in suppressing the infection curve still further, he no longer expected there to be a single peak in May.

Mr Quayle said he was ’really proud’ how the whole of the island has responded to the crisis ’as a team’. He said: ’People have gone that extra mile to help. It really has been roll your sleeves up time. I feel really proud to be Manx.’

The Chief Minister said the protection of life had been the number one priority. The decision to close the border to all arrivals had been taken to protect the 99.6% of the population already home from a second bout of coronavirus being brought in, he said.

He said moves to reopen sectors of the inner economy on a phased basis would be subject to the ’data not altering significantly’. ’There will be no one big jump but a number of smaller steps. If we don’t see a spike in the spread of the virus we would like to bring in more sectors to get back to work.’

But the island was also part of a global economy and will be impacted by events outside our borders. Mr Quayle said the island had to be ready to hit the ground running when the time came to reopen the borders.