Professor Philip Nolan:

On case numbers we were at the more pessimistic end. The vaccines did not offer a whole lot of protection against getting infected with Omicron but exceeded expectations in their protection against people getting severely ill and requiring critical care. Thus, the cases tracked our more pessimistic scenarios. Hospitalisations were actually around the central scenario. We peaked at in excess of 1,000 people in hospital but the most important thing was that with critical care admissions and deaths, we were well ahead of the optimistic position. We could not have known that in advance. It would have been foolishly risky to imagine that might happen but we were not only fortunate as it was a critical step when Omicron was coming that the decision was made to accelerate the booster programme.

That protected a significant number of citizens and then those boosters turned out to be more effective than we expected in preventing people requiring critical care or dying. That is a summary of where we are against those models.