Overzealous models from December, when little was known about omicron, are not due to faulty science or pessimistic experts, but because the variant is less deadly and vaccine-evading than was feared when the models were made.

For example, on Sunday it emerged that the Scottish Government had received new modelling showing daily infections would peak at around 70,000 on Thursday or Friday this week before tumbling to around 20,000 by the end of the month.

This is far earlier than predictions made by Humza Yousaf, the Scottish Health Secretary, and Prof Jason Leitch, the national clinical director, who said the omicron “tsunami” would not peak until late January or early February.

And while case numbers and hospitalisations show signs of dropping, both Prof Hunter and Prof Spiegelhalter believe vaccines are preventing intensive care wards, and therefore the NHS as a whole, from being overwhelmed.

As of January 8, there are 708 people in England needing mechanical ventilation, the lowest it has been since October 18. A year ago, more than 3,000 people were on ventilators.

“The reduction in intensive care unit beds will have a substantially greater impact on workload than case numbers dropping,” Prof Hunter said.

“People in desperate need of a major surgical operation, whether it be brain tumour, coronary artery bypass grafts, cancer surgery, a lot of the time these people are going to go on into intensive care units for a short while before they can go back to the open ward.

“Now, if all those beds are occupied by people with COVID then you can’t do the heroic surgery.

“If this fall in mechanical ventilation bed occupancy continues, that would be a huge reduction in work demand for nurses and doctors but also it would start to free up beds so we could go back to doing surgery on people with the most desperate need but can’t have it done at the moment because of a lack of access to ventilation beds.”

Intensive care occupancy lower than previous five years

As a result of low numbers of Covid patients needing ventilation, there are now fewer people in critical care beds in England than at the same time in the previous five years.

Official NHS England data show that on January 2 2022, there were 3,055 people in critical care beds in England, leaving a quarter of total critical care beds still available.

On January 2 2021, there were 3,911 critical care beds filled out of an available 4,875 (80 per cent). In 2018, during a bad flu season, 3,270 of 3,704 critical care beds (88 per cent) were being used.

Prof Spiegelhalter said: “We certainly are not going to see a big rise in intensive care admissions and deaths [from Covid].

“Intensive care is not under the sort of stress it was in the past, but there is still a completely disproportionate number of people in intensive care who are unvaccinated and it is vaccination which is saving us from total catastrophe,” Prof Spiegelhalter said.

But he did warn that although cases may start coming down, it is unlikely to happen rapidly due to the high prevalence of infection.

“It isn’t going to come down quickly and it’s going to be unbelievably tough for the NHS, particularly for staff absences,” he said.