continuing to infect large numbers of people in scotland, across the uk and in many other countries around the world. hospital admissions and overall hospital occupancy also remains high. however notwithstanding the very real challenges covid continues to present the evidence i set out last week suggesting that the situation was beginning to improve has significantly strengthened over the past seven days for topic combination booster vaccinations, the willingness of the public to adapt their behaviour to help stem transmission and temporary measures introduced in december have helped blunt the impact of the 0micron wave. last week i said the data indicated cases were falling across most age groups and i can report today that this trend has continued. there still needs to be some caution applied in interpreting case data at this stage given the recent changes to guidance on pcr and lateral flow