For governments around the world, the year ends much as it began – worrying about how to tame Covid without crashing the economy. Notwithstanding the success of vaccines in preventing serious illness, it’s fair to say that no-one has yet come up with a comprehensive answer.

In any case, just as we thought it safe to go back in the water, along comes the great white shark of omicron. The latest variant is apparently less deadly, but a lot more infectious, causing the underlying concern that has dictated policy from the start – whether healthcare systems can cope – to come surging back to the fore.

Only this time, it is a different sort of problem. In past waves of the pandemic, the worry was that the sheer number of Covid patients needing hospital treatment would overwhelm already stretched health services. This time, it is less the number of patients – the number of patients in hospital with Covid in England is actually lower than in the autumn – as the damage the virus is inflicting on the supply of doctors and nurses.

I have been unable to find reliable up-to-date data on the proportion of sick NHS medical and ancillary staff, but according to some estimates, it could already be approaching 20pc, with the problem particularly acute in London, the epicentre of the latest outbreak. The potential vulnerability of insufficient beds has given way to one of insufficient staff.

But however things pan out, we would unarguably be in far worse shape here in Britain but for the relative success of the Government’s vaccine strategy. The year began with a furious row with Brussels over AstraZeneca’s apparent willingness to prioritise the UK in supply of its pioneering vaccine over European Union member states. Temporarily, it put the UK ahead of the game in vaccinating its citizens. But, politically, it also poisoned the well against the Astra vaccine, enabling the main rival, the hugely more expensive Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA vaccine, to effectively corner the market in both the EU and the US. As it is, the emerging evidence is that the Astra vaccine offers better long term protection against severe disease than the alternatives, helping to explain why Britain’s Covid death rate is now quite a bit lower than much of the EU.

The full story of what happened in this unseemly scramble for vaccine supremacy has yet to be told, but that wider public health considerations got forgotten in corporate profiteering and political point scoring is not in doubt. In any case, the slight lead the UK gained in vaccine rollout scarcely seemed to matter in the end. According to the latest comparison from “Our World in Data”, Spain, Italy, France and Germany are now ahead of the UK in terms of the proportion of people fully vaccinated against Covid, with even Brazil not far behind.