It is no surprise that scandals about lockdown parties are weighing heavily on the public mood at the moment, but they risk distracting us from what should be the biggest story of substance today – the worst of the omicron wave has passed with few significant problems. Last month’s decisions not to impose additional restrictions have been stunningly vindicated.

Even as Parliament debated the implementation of Plan B in December, many scientists were demanding far stricter rules. SAGE modellers assessed the impacts of returning to “Step 2” level restrictions – taking us back to the rules of April 2021. Leaks to journalists suggested that some form of post-Christmas lockdown was already scheduled. Modellers warned that without restrictions going well beyond Plan B there could be tens of thousands of hospitalisations per day. Imperial College models reportedly predicted 3,000 deaths per day, even in their best-case-scenario.

Yet after Lord Frost resigned over the implementation of Plan B and 101 Conservative backbenchers rebelled against it, with others only voting to support Plan B on the basis of undertakings that no further measures would be introduced (at least without consulting Parliament), it become clear that any further restrictions would have to be brought before Cabinet. When that happened, virtually the entire Cabinet opposed the proposals (just four ministers were apparently in favour). Additional pre-Christmas restrictions were rejected, as they were in the immediate review after Christmas.

That was a brave decision, and for a time even those that supported it feared things might get hairy. Whereas in early December there were about 1,000 positive cases per day in England amongst those over 65, by late December it had risen to nearly 20,000. All through the covid crisis, reflecting the age profile of serious disease, changes in hospitalisations had tended to track changes in cases amongst older patients fairly closely. If English hospitalisations had risen twenty-fold, in line with cases amongst older people, that would have raised daily hospital admissions from around 700 per day to 14,000 per day – which would have been challenging even for covid hawks to accept.

Yet nothing like that happened at all. Covid hospitalisations in England rose only about threefold, to a little over 2,000 per day at peak. The number of beds occupied by covid patients reached less than half its January 2021 level and has now started falling back – especially in London. Even these figures exaggerate the scale of the issue since the proportion of covid hospitalisations that are incidental (that is to say, the patients may happen to have covid whilst in hospital but covid is not the reason they are there) has risen from around 25 per cent with delta to getting on for 40 per cent now.

Overall cases in London have now been falling for weeks, and England-wide cases amongst older people have fallen back significantly, having peaked shortly after Christmas (presumably from Christmas mixing). If cases amongst older people rising twenty-fold created so little issue for hospitals it seems highly implausible that anything omicron-related could now happen that would do so. Overall cases are now down more than 25 per cent from their peak (on a seven day average basis) and falling rapidly.

So the Cabinet was right. Additional restrictions were not required. As happened last July, September and October, warnings that disaster would follow if extra restrictions were not imposed proved false. Through some combination of voluntary behaviour change, mildness of omicron, success of the booster campaign, and the impacts of very recent delta infections, the worst of the omicron wave – at least in terms of infections in older people – has passed with relatively little incident.

This will surely colour future policy responses if further new variants arise (or indeed if omicron should somehow return). It will probably prove very difficult to persuade the Cabinet that risks are as high as claimed, regardless of how much academic epidemiological models paint a lurid picture of deaths and hospitalisations. Rather, it seems likely that, at least until we get some actual disaster in the UK or witness, from abroad, the sort of scenes we saw from Italy in February 2020, the Cabinet’s preferred policy response from now on will be “Liberty or bust”.