This is the Guardian. More than 3.5 million people in the UK had coronavirus last week.

Anyone who thinks our battle with COVID is over, I'm afraid is profoundly wrong. In England, that

meant one in 15 people were infected. We now know that Omicron is milder than previous variants so while hospital

admissions are rising quickly with over 15,000 COVID patients now in hospital

in England alone this is is not yet, thankfully, translating into the same numbers

needing intensive care that we saw in previous waves.

For some, this won't be their first experience of COVID.

As Omicron rapidly spread, it, in many cases, managed to evade both our vaccines and if, natural defences.

So how many of us are getting reinfected?

And if even with Boosters, we can still catch COVID-19, what does that mean for isolation

and our other public health measures in 2022.

I would say we have a good chance of getting through the Omicron wave without the need for further restrictions.

From The Guardian, I'm Madeline Finley, and this is Science Weekly.

To catch up on what's been happening with Omicron, I spoke to Guardian Science Editor Ian Sample.

Well, Ian, for a lot of families across the UK, it will have been a very stressful Christmas holiday.

And so first off, it would be great if you could just take me through the numbers of where we are. When we spoke before the break,

we were potentially facing an exponential rise in cases. Is this what we've seen?

We've certainly seen a massive rising cases as predicted. I mean the UK

broke another pandemic record this week. We reported more than 200,000 daily cases on Tuesday. That did include a backlog for a few days from Northern Ireland and Wales, but it's still an awful lot of cases.

Hospitalizations are rising steeply too on the back of those. I mean nowhere near as steeply as they did last

January but they're still rising and we're at about 2,000 daily hospitalizations at the moment, but that number's expected to keep on rising,

simply because the cases are still rising. As this variant spreads beyond London and starts having an impact around the country.

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