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Now I want you to look at a tale of two newspapers.
The Times in England, and the Times in Scotland. The Scottish edition goes with “Gatherings ‘likely to be banned well into spring.'”
And the English variety splashes "Ministers confident new curbs not needed,” Which is right?
On the one hand National COVID hospital patients are up by 68 percent in one week. We saw confirmed cases breach 200,000 a day over Christmas, and while they have since fallen- there is likely a reporting delay over this unusual bank holiday weekend.
And these cases will not show up in hospitals for one to two weeks, meanwhile one in 10 NHS staff were off sick on New Year’s Eve.
The isolation crisis is biting hospitals, with United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust last night declaring a “critical incident” with what it said was “unprecedented” staff shortages, and "compromised care".
On the other hand of course, it looks like cases have plateaued in London, they may well have turned a corner elsewhere too.
And as I said endlessly in December, any measures introduced in January will arguably be too late to shift the dial, if the peak comes before they take effect.
The hospitalisations we will see over the next two weeks are already baked in. There's nothing we can do about them. And they may be the worst of it.
South Africa of course saw a natural crash in its Omicron case load and far from introducing new restrictions, it is now winding down many of its Covid measures.
And away from epidemiology, the political context in England at least appears to have swung against restrictions. Andy Burnham and Tony Blair have come out against further lockdowns.
A 100 strong Tory rebellion on Plan B would likely only grow in the face of harsher proposals.
After two years of Covid in the UK, with this disease stretching across four calendar years, many are beginning to say if not now, when?
Is it time to end the era of government restrictions on our social lives?