cancelling office parties family parties. i think there is a precautionary principle that the public understand about public health. you know, if in doubt we don t know how bad omicron really will be, because it will take quite a few weeks before you really get mass hospitalisations, we re not there yet they re more cautious. i think there s a lot of trouble with the nhs i ve been covering the nhs for more decades than i d like to count and it has never been in such a fragile state. and it entered this crisis this covid crisis having had a decade of its most stringent funding, since it was founded in 19118. it had 100,000 medical vacancies and then, after brexit, it lost a lot of staff. people went. it s part of the idiocy of brexit was to get rid of people we really needed working here. and there s now a waiting list of 6 million people. well, back in 2010, when this
on that question of brexit no longer being an issue, this christmas, it doesn t really matter whether you ve been naughty or nice, because omicron is coming to town, if it isn t already in your town. in the 2a hours to friday of this week, 93,000 people were infected. daily records have been broken all this week, and will probably continue to be broken, as the rate at which people are becoming infected far exceeds anything seen in the pandemic so far. boris johnson described the british government s response as a jabathon giving people vaccine booster jabs to limit any effect this new, largely unknown variant of covid will have. it may be a milder infection than previous variants, but if the numbers infected are so much greater than before, then more people will end up in hospital. and i suppose, henry, in that sense, if you could give us a sense of already what impact this is having and why, i suppose, in a sense, we re not starting from scratch here. we re starting in a situation
procedures have had to be put on hold over the last 21 months to deal with covid, and now the point perhaps where people were starting to feel the health service was able to get back into routine, some of it very important, some of it life saving routine, it s kind of going to be forced back into a kind of reacting to covid situation. i mjust remembering a year ago now when also, you had a new variant that was the kent variant, that was discovered here in britain, was galloping through the country. and the uncertainty that people felt. and now, just exactly 12 months later, we re having a bit of a rerun of that with with omicron. i think the scientists are still saying the jury is out. the data are trickling in in places like south africa, where it was first detected. but here in britain, the scientific advisers are saying it won t be until the end of the month and possibly well into january before we have a really strong picture as to whether omicron, which does appear to be more
transmissible, is actually less virulent. now, as you said, if it s less virulent, but is still attacking a larger base of people, that could still create great problems for the health service. and we ll have to see how that pans out. we re seeing it doubling in the us every couple of days, which is much faster than delta, but hospitalisations haven t gone up across the board. they ve been bad in some places like michigan or new york, and we ve been seeing a lot more omicron cases there, but i think we need to approach this with the same caution that we ve approached the other variants. we don t know exactly how two booster shots. excuse me, two regular doses of the vaccine will hold up. it seems like they don t hold up so well, so we do need to be going under the jabathon that borisjohnson is promoting, and alsojust taking the precautions that we ve now already become quite accustomed to, and are of really no hardship, to wear a mask in public, let s say, which is now mandatory once a
i think there is a precautionary principle that the public understand about public health. if in doubt, we don t know how bad omicron will be, because it will take quite a few weeks before you really get mass hospitalisations, if that s what we re going to get. we re not there yet. people are more cautious. i think there s a lot of trouble with the nhs. i ve been covering the nhs for more decades than i d like to count, and it has never been in such a fragile state. and it entered this covid crisis having had a decade of its most stringent funding since it was founded in 19118. it had 100,000 medical vacancies, and after brexit, it lost a lot of staff. people went. part of the idiocy of brexit was to get rid of people we really needed. and there s now a waiting list of six million people. back in 2010, when this