The Prime Minister has announced that all residual domestic Covid regulations, including self-isolation, are to be removed a month early. From July until late November the only restrictions most people faced were masks on the underground (a London Mayoralty rule rather than a national rule) and self-isolation. From late November until early January we had to wear masks in shops and there was a period when Covid status certificates were required for various indoor events. Shortly, even mandatory self-isolation will end – presumably accompanied by a ramp down of testing in schools.

Of course, the end of mandatory self-isolation doesn’t mean an end to self-isolation, just as an end to mandatory masking doesn’t mean no-one wears masks any more. Common sense suggests that people are likely to be less likely to go out in public when sick, in future, and to be less tolerant of other people doing so.

Nonetheless, this is a welcome further step on the road to full normalisation. My calculations suggest that around three quarters of the population have now had Covid of one variant or another. In combination with the very high levels of vaccination in the population (especially given that infection rates amongst the unvaccinated have been higher than amongst the vaccinated), that provides us, collectively, with an extremely broad range of immunity. For most of us that is now some form of hybrid immunity, from some combination of infections with multiple variants, infections plus vaccination or vaccination with more than one different type of vaccine.

Immunologists assure us that this is likely to mean that, even if a future new variant arises that evades our defences against infection, as omicron so unexpectedly did, we should find that future infections are sufficiently mild that they harm us only a little more (or perhaps even a little less) than a case of ‘flu.

In the event, the omicron wave was almost as dramatic as billed in terms of the number of infections, but produced very few hospitalisations and around half of those were incidental (people going to hospital happened to have omicron but were attending hospital for some other reason) and even fewer deaths. If our immunity wall is such that even over 200,000 cases per day produces only a modest and relatively untroubling level of hospitalisations, any future new variant would have to involve something dramatically new to present any real threat. In the meantime, cases and hospitalisations are already down to the levels of November and dropping further rapidly.

When once we watched the dashboard earnestly at 4pm to see the latest deaths numbers and listened attentively to the 5pm daily press conference, now Covid is feeling like yesterday’s news. Inflation, future tax rises, levelling up plans, green policy, post-Brexit regulatory changes – these are the new policy questions. Perhaps some new variant will turn up in a few months time, but policymakers’ first instinct will be to tough it out and depend on immunity to deal with it. Lockdowns, masks, Perspex screens in our coffee shops, drinking outdoors even in the rain, even schools testing and legal self-isolation – hopefully these are now permanently behind us (at least until the next pandemic). And I for one say: goodbye and good riddance!