"Omicron is not the same disease as Delta and Alpha. While it is unbelievably infectious – just look at how many of your family and friends will have had it recently – it is not as dangerous now. That is not to say it can be trivialised, however."
"If you have not been vaccinated, you will still be at risk; severe Covid pneumonia in healthy people remains primarily a disease of the unvaccinated."
"But the majority of patients coming into hospital with Covid these days are admitted for other reasons and just happen to test positive, reflecting the enormous community prevalence."
"Not to mention the significant number who catch it while on our wards; this has been a big problem from the beginning but with Omicron it is ever harder to avoid."
"Numbers in intensive care with Covid are small and population immunity is high. Due largely to a combination of high vaccination rates and widespread exposure through near disastrous pandemic management, Covid is not the killer it once was."
"Still, there is no time to relax. We have a shiny, new, ambitious elective recovery plan to get on with. We will be showered with billions of pounds – though not as much as was wasted on unusable PPE, I note – to support us as we try to pretend the pandemic never happened."
"As things stand, we cannot fill our vacant posts and we do not even have secure funding to keep people in post for the long Covid provision we have managed to set up. It is an uphill, exhausting struggle."
"And this is the time that our PM, out of the blue, has chosen to announce the early removal of all restrictions. Everyone I have spoken to has been taken aback by this. Are we still “following the science”? And, in practice, what will this mean?"
"We need to recognise how valuable and precious and fragile our NHS is. Yet the framing of the recovery plan to me suggests that we are aiming simply to get back to where we were in 2019."
"And even this is being gambled on – again – by rushing to remove restrictions ahead of a planned timescale."
"We need strong, careful leadership, as we will do for many years to come. I don’t want to be over-cautious, but it is not appropriate for those in charge to risk our health by doing what suits them politically at any given moment. We all deserve better than that."
A gambler never knows when to quit! 
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