Now Christmas is over, how bad is the Omicron situation in England? | Paul Hunter

Key to understanding the next part of the pandemic will be the number, and length, of hospitalisations

Public holidays are notoriously difficult for epidemiologists - people may avoid or delay both testing and hospital visits, making for slightly unreliable numbers. But some things are still clear from the latest Covid data released by the government. Omicron is now responsible for more than 90% of all new infections in England (the other three nations haven't published a full set of data yet), meaning that its particular effects are now driving the pandemic. And its rate of growth versus earlier this month appears to have slowed considerably.

It is barely three weeks ago that Omicron infections were more than doubling every two days. If that rate of increase had continued we would be close to 1 million infections per day by now. Even the Christmas holiday cannot explain the difference between that estimate and the most recent reported infection numbers for England of 117,000. On the other hand, hopes from before Christmas that we may have seen the epidemic peak were almost certainly premature. Overall cases are still increasing, and we haven't seen the worst daily report yet, but the lower rate of increase means a lower eventual peak than previously thought.

Paul Hunter is a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia

The headline of this article was amended on 30 December 2021 to reflect the fact that it was about England, rather than the UK