It is very difficult to know in advance. At the peak of this pandemic, we had 38,000 patients in hospital across the UK at any one time with covid, but of course that meant that other non-urgent treatments had to be delayed. There is a question of the trade-off and how much treatment is delayed. In a bad flu season, elective operations and non-urgent treatments are delayed. That is one way in which the NHS manages through a difficult flu season in winter. Measures like that will be necessary if we have an increase in covid cases.
If we have learned anything in the last year, we have learned that we have to live with risk as a society. That is a reality, so the goal and the strategy are to invest in the NHS so that it has more capacity, make sure that it can expand capacity and make sure that we have the vaccine effort and the continued efforts that people will no doubt take personal responsibility for, such as mask-wearing—and people will be highly likely do that to protect themselves and others, after the experience we have just had. I want to get to a point of personal responsibility plus the vaccine plus the test and trace programme, so that people can be regularly tested and we can use that to break the chains of transmission. I want to manage covid in that way, while restoring our freedoms. That is the best way, once we have made our way carefully down this road.