Oh what a tangled web we weave. It is at times like this I envy people who pay no attention to the media, social or traditional. If the only things you knew about the Covid situation in January was that we were in lockdown, we’ve got vaccines, and life would return to normal once everyone who wanted a vaccine had been given one, you would have lower blood pressure and a more realistic outlook than those who follow every twist and turn.

It is to the government’s credit that it has kept a cool head, ignoring the clowns to the left of them and the jokers on the right. The threat of vaccine passports was always a bluff to encourage young people to get their jabs. It worked well enough for the government to then shelve the idea and it is clearly reluctant to follow the authoritarians in Scotland and Wales by bringing them in. Despite the frownies’ feeding frenzy in October, health secretary Sajid Javid showed no sign of reaching for Plan B and made it fairly obvious that he was prepared to tolerate case numbers of 100,000 or more before he would abandon Plan A. This now looks less likely than ever. Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance also seem fairly relaxed about the current approach and even the modellers have started to project a relatively painless end to the epidemic in the months ahead.

We can see why if we take a step back and look at how things have progressed since step three of the roadmap took place in May. The UK has got the bulk of its exit wave out of the way before November and is heading into winter with a wall of immunity, natural and pharmaceutical, among every age group. Fortified by booster shots among those who most need them, we have flattened the curve – just as the government intended at the start of the pandemic when it was foolishly following a plan designed for influenza. Now that the vaccines have pushed the mortality risk down to flu-like levels, the rationale for that plan finally makes sense.