At the height of the pandemic, and particularly before the arrival of the vaccines, restrictions on hospital visitors made some sense. The inability of the NHS to control the spread of the virus through vulnerable patients will have resulted in deaths that might otherwise have been prevented. The health service’s poor record on infection control in general ought to be a subject considered in the upcoming Covid inquiry.

But the retention of those restrictions now – when all Covid measures have been lifted in the community, and when most people are fully vaccinated and indeed boosted – is not just disproportionate, it is cruel. As this newspaper reports today, more than one in eight hospital trusts are still refusing to allow relatives to visit patients, despite changes to NHS guidance instructing them to open up.

Isolating patients away from their friends and family can itself have negative consequences for their health. For families with older or particularly infirm relatives in hospital, it can also be worrying if they are not able to visit them in person, to confirm that they are receiving the treatment they require.

Hospital trusts defend these measures on the basis that, in some areas, infection rates among the general population have been rising. That may be true, but surely before taking the drastic step of denying patients their ability to see family, they ought to be required to prove that admitting visitors would place an unsustainable burden on the hospital. Otherwise, the public will conclude that the NHS is merely clinging on to Covid as an excuse to avoid going back to normal.