The Spectator is searching for the UK's brightest entrepreneurs to enter the Spectator Economic Innovator of the Year Awards in partnership with Charles Stanley wealth managers.

If you have a business that disrupts an existing market, a smart new way of doing things, or something that has incredible social impact, then apply by 1st of July at spectator.co.uk forward slash innovator.

Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by Katie Balls and James Sosithe.

So Katie, we're seeing a rising number of cases, but thankfully not seeing a rise in the number

of hospitalisations or deaths. So is that good news for July 19th? I mean, ministers still sound

pretty optimistic about July 19th, and one of the reasons for the delay was to see if the link

between cases, hospitalizations and

deaths had been broken i think the fact uh that cases are now at 16,000 but over that two days in

a row obviously shows that they're on the rise and i think that there are obviously going to be

some who just worry about high cases in of themselves because if they go high

enough, even if you have massively reduced the number of hospitalisations, you know, not everyone

is vaccinated, younger people don't have the second doses yet. So I think we might start to hear

some of these arguments coming back out in the coming weeks if this is one direction. But I think

when it comes to ministers,

ultimately what they're looking at is the hospitalisation's death link and that's the most important thing. So I wouldn't be surprised if you get some scientists used to commenting on this,

starting a sound alarm in the coming weeks of this if it keeps going up at this rate. But I think

from Boris Johnson's perspective, ultimately, deaths and hospitalisation is the most

important thing. And also, you have people like Patrick Vilanse who say, well, you've got to

have an exit wave at some point. And it should really be in the summer, not the autumn. So even

if cases are going up rapidly, there has to be an easing at some point. And how far back can

you really push it from 19th to July? So if you look at it, this is the third

day in a row that the seven-day average of hospital admissions has been in decline, even with the

...