I really don’t know which way to swing on this, what do you think?? Should we be relaxing or shouldn’t we? The article tells us:
With new treatments and a huge amount of immunity in the population, from both vaccination and infection, the risk from the virus is lessening all the time.
Other nations are also relaxing rules around self-isolation. Denmark, for example, now requires people to stay at home only if they have symptoms.
Nonetheless, there are also grounds for caution. Infection levels remain high.
And the Office for National Statistics (ONS) monitoring programme suggests they may even be rising again, with about one out of every 19 people in England positive last week.
Coupled with this is the rise of a sub-variant of Omicron, BA.2, thought to be even more transmissible than the version, first identified in South Africa, that caused the Christmas surge. BA.2 now accounts for an estimated one out of every six infections - a proportion that is growing every week.
This is one of the reasons Prof Paul Hunter, an expert in infectious disease, at the University of East Anglia, was surprised by the announcement on self-isolation.
"At some point, it is going to be the case that all remaining restrictions are dropped, including the need to self-isolate, though I certainly didn't expect that to happen this month," he says.
Prof Hunter would have preferred to wait a little bit longer to see what happens with infections and the sub-variant.