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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by Katie Balls and James Forsy.

So today we had a record number of recorded cases at around 88,000 infections, which is higher than even in the

January lockdown. Katie, the Omicron situation is not looking good for the country and especially

for London right now, is it? Cases are going up rapidly and I think the numbers we've seen

clearly point to everything we've already in a way suspected about this variant, which is that

it does spread much more easily. It's very transmissible. I also think though if you look at the

numbers today, so today we're speaking on Thursday, 88,376 cases. If you think about Halifat

yesterday, it was 78,000 cases, I think you are having some people say,

well, look, this is clearly more spreadable than Delta, but also this idea is doubling every

two days. Let's wait and see, because the modelling suggested this would balloon to such a thing.

So I think actually, while the numbers are higher than what we've seen previously,

I think there is a little bit of sense of, let's just see the trajectory of this to see if it does actually compare to that quite

scary modelling, because that has over has been a modelling of prediction. I think in terms of

concerns over Omicron, I think the government is very concerned. We had a press conference yesterday,

and it was a bit of a strange

press conference because you had nothing new really announced. Boris Johnson had already done

that address to the nation. We had spoken about increasing the booster rollout, this big focus on it.

...