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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 James Lassife and Katie Balls.

So today, for the first-timeing a long time, the UK has reached over 50,000 new cases of COVID-in-a-day.

Now, James, on the face of it, it sounds like a big number,

but aren't we past a point at which we care about cases by themselves? So hospitalisations

is the more important factor. I think in cases, especially given the fact that lots of cases

are concentrated in younger age groups who tend not to get seriously sick. But more worryingly,

I think, is the number of COVID patients in hospital is back over 8,000 now. The Spectators

Data Hub makes the point that the number of COVID patients in NHS hospitals is still in single

digits as a percentage. But I think the

worry is this, is that the NHS has always been run with very little spare capacity. That's one

of the ways in which the system is made in a vertical almost efficient. And the worry is that, you know,

there are winters, there was one when I think 2018 2018 or was it 2019, when, I think it's

2018, when Jeremy Hunt, the then Health Secretary, cancelled all elective operations because

there was a bad flu season and that reduced space. And I think the worry is that if the number

of COVID patients ticks up, it's not that we're going to have a number of cases akin to what we

had in the pre-vaccination era, but just that number increasing a bit more could put the NHS

under real pressure if you end up with a bad flu season or other classic kind of winter

health pressures on the NHS. Now, Katie, in yesterday's press conference, Sajadavid, the new health secretary,

...