hours curtailed to try and stop incidental infections. in the press today, there is talk of potentially cutting the isolation period for staff that work in the nhs down from the seven days, before it was ten daysin the seven days, before it was ten days in england, now down to seven with lateral flow testing for a couple of days, but in other countries, in the united states for example, they have cut that down to five days and there are some calls to do the same thing in this country. at the moment, the level of staff absences is manageable, i think, but i think the concern is what happened over the next couple of weeks, because when you have got 189,000 people a day as we had yesterday testing positive in the uk, obviously, a chunk of those are going to be hospital and nhs staff and people working in other parts of the health service, 999 call operators, ambulance staff and that is a concern going forward into january. the prime minister has urged people to take a covid test before attending new year's eve parties this evening. there is continued concern over the availability of coronavirus