Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling, whether you're just dreaming of a great escape, or actually away and having the time of your life.

Well, I hope you are, because I'm afraid I've just written down still in the bleak midwinter.

What are the implications for your travels?

Because today's podcast is all about the record infection rates that we are seeing across Europe.

Not just in the UK, not just in France, where unbelievably they have more than 200,000

new COVID-19 infections in just 24 hours. But many other places, Cyprus, France, Greece, Iceland,

Italy, Malta, Montenegro, Portugal and Spain.

These are all, it seems, a result of Omicron, the rapidly spreading variant of COVID that somehow I don't seem quite to have caught yet,

but I'm rather resigned to the fact that I will do probably sooner rather than later.

It is spreading, as they say, like wildfire around the world.

To give you one example, even in Australia, there have been something like 18,000 new cases of COVID-19.

That is just an impossible number.

Now most of them are in New South Wales, they've got over 11,000.

But given that Australia has up until now really kept everything

at bay, when you are getting numbers like that, effectively the game is up. And I think even

parts of Australia, such as Western Australia, which has really cut itself off the world, is now going to have to face the fact that there is no stopping COVID.

There are cases that are popping up even in places where they really kept a lid on COVID and those will tend to be brought in by air crew or people leaving,

going in on compassionate reasons. It's very sad but I'm afraid that is where we are.

And what's this mean for travel?

Well, it might mean in the longer term, and I don't mean, you know, 10 years, I mean,

possibly 10 weeks, possibly even less, that things will get much easier.

If the world has to accept that a nasty virus, which thankfully has a effective array of

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