Covid: UK records highest number of daily cases since pandemic began

Prioritise the social interactions that really matter to you – that’s the advice from the UK’s chief medical adviser Chris Whitty this evening as he outlined the massive surge in Covid cases.

With the number of Omicron cases now doubling in less than two days in some regions, he warned against assuming this new variant would be less severe than the Delta wave, because there was so much still to find out, adding: “The things we do know are bad.”

The latest government figures show that in the 24 hours up to 9am today, 78,610 people have tested positive for Covid-19.

Meanwhile, 656,711 more people have now received a third or booster dose of the vaccine.