The bad news is that the UK has suffered a historic recession of truly epic proportions.
The good news is that it has already been over for months, because the recession ended as quickly as it began.
GDP fell in March and in April. Growth returned in May, so the recovery has already been going for longer than the recession.
It only just ticks the box to match the usual definition of a recession, which is two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. If the virus had struck a few weeks later, it would all have come in the second quarter, leading to a strange position of one huge collapse but not an "official" recession.
This is the shortest recession on record. Indeed, it is the shortest possible recession.
So much for the technical smartery. The official definition of a recession is hardly the most important challenge facing the UK right now.
What really matters is how fast the economy claws its way back up to its pre-pandemic level.
“The economy” in this instance really means people: how soon will people return to their old patterns of behaviour, or at least equivalent levels of spending and working, even if they do it in a slightly different way?
It should, in theory, be possible to get back to normal almost as fast as the official restrictions lift and industries are allowed to get back to work.
Unlike a "normal", business cycle recession, this was caused by businesses closing their doors and flicking the switch off for reasons of public health.
So a recovery can take place as bosses walk back in and flick the switch back on. That is why the economy had already recovered a third of its lost ground by June.
Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, said in late July that he thought half of the lost ground had been recovered.
It means a month-on-month chart of GDP looks like the beginnings of the letter V. “So far, so V”, as Haldane put it.
The furlough scheme should help with this. If businesses had been ordered to shut down but offered no help, they would have had to lay off millions of workers, being unable to pay them to stay at home for months on end.
Instead the Government picked up the tab, and the workers are still there and able to return to the office, factory or shop immediately. That eases the recovery.
There should be more to come. The hospitality industry was only able to reopen from 4 July, so was closed for the entire second quarter from April to June.
This was down almost 90pc, so the sector is ripe for a major recovery.
Yet its plight also illustrates the difficulties of getting back up to February’s production levels rapidly - completing the V-shape.