These results have since been echoed by researchers in Edinburgh where, based on an admittedly small number of cases, researchers found a two-thirds reduction in rates of hospitalisation with omicron compared with an equivalent delta infection. Danish, UK and Israeli data also seem to be singing from the same song sheet. Meanwhile, Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at East Anglia, said on Tuesday that we should look to scrap self-isolation in 2022 as Covid’s symptoms reduce to something akin to the common cold.

So far in the pandemic, the country has been divided on how to deal with spikes in cases: there’s those who favour a light touch approach and those who want imposed restraint. Perhaps now is the moment we can look beyond these arguments, toward a near future where Covid lives with us and we with it. Because what most people do agree on is that periodically pummelling our pubs and entertainment venues, paralysing the economy, denting education and destabilising the nation’s mental health to control outbreaks of variants with uncertain characteristics is just not a sustainable long-term proposition. As one elderly care home resident put it to me recently: “This is not living. So what am I living for?”

Omicron isn’t the first and it won’t be the last variant: Covid-19 has plenty more rolls of the genetic dice where that came from. What we now need is a robust plan for living with Covid, not allowing it to rule our lives with lockdowns. As Oxford University’s Carl Heneghan told the Today programme last week, calling for more personal responsibility and agency “this is as good as it gets”

So, what can we do to safeguard our future? How do we implement Plan LWC, with the virus endemic in society, producing seasonal surges like the one we are seeing right now?

There are bright lights on the horizon and we’ve learned a lot over the last two years. In the near term, we’re seeing initial data suggesting that, although the vaccines might not be perfect at halting omicron and variants like it, they seem nevertheless still to be effective at preventing severe disease. As Boris Johnson said to Kate Bingham when she was appointed to set up and lead the UK’s vaccine taskforce, “we need to stop people dying”. Indeed, it’s consequences, not cases, we need to focus on.

We also know who is at greatest risk from Covid-19, meaning we know where to concentrate our firepower. And that now includes a suite of new drugs that, for the first time, can be used to stop people who catch the virus from falling seriously ill. Pfizer’s new agent, Paxlovid, which is currently awaiting regulatory approval, is the first dedicated anti-coronavirus agent. Given as a short course when a person first develops the infection, it blocks the ability of the virus to assemble new viral particles inside our cells, knocking down rates of serious disease by as much as 90 per cent. Merck have also re-purposed a flu drug, molnupiravir, which they were working on pre-pandemic. This throws a spanner in the mechanism used by the virus to copy its genetic code. In initial trials it cut rates of severe disease by 50 per cent.

There are also antibody preparations that can be used to “top up” a patient’s own immunity, helping their immune systems to get a head start fighting off the virus should they fall ill. This week, these preparations began to be offered in some parts of the country to at-risk individuals.

Behind the scenes, vaccine manufacturers are also working on “Covid vaccine 2.0”, including updates to our existing vaccines to better reflect the new variants and broader spectrum vaccines that will work against variants that don’t even exist yet.

Such treatments are an essential part of Plan LWC: they help us protect the vulnerable from Covid-19 while also protecting the freedoms of those for whom Covid is otherwise a mild infection. Essentially the aim is to convert what is a lethal infection for some into a trivial infection for everyone. As such, we can manage Covid-19 much as we do the flu. We protect the vulnerable via annual vaccination, which we periodically update to stay in step with what the virus is doing, and we have drugs to reduce the impact of flu in those unlucky enough to catch it.

But, to my mind, there’s one other major priority that we ignore at our peril. Boris Johnson has urged us to “build back better”. So let’s start with the NHS and specifically one aspect of healthcare that seems to be persistently overlooked: infection control. One of the reasons why our hospitals are in a permanent state of crisis is because we are routinely operating them at near full capacity. While that might sound attractive from an efficiency point of view, quite the opposite is true in practice. With no room to manoeuvre, when an infectious outbreak occurs there are too few places to isolate infected individuals and cases quickly amplify as patients infect each other. The ensuing ward closures and cancelled surgeries mean that even a handful of cases can capsize the service.

What we really need to help us to live with Covid-19 are large numbers of dedicated single occupancy isolation facilities in every hospital, with testing facilities nearby, so any new admissions can be safely screened before they go anywhere near a ward. My prediction is that the number of beds we’ll save by not closing wards or losing staff members to sickness will more than compensate for the capital outlay. Perhaps then we’ll climb a few ladders rather than sliding down snakes every winter…