It’s the variant that’s threatened Christmas, triggered a record-breaking vaccination drive, and seen Covid measures tightened. 

But how much do we know about Omicron? How effective are boosters? Are you less likely to get severely ill than you are from Delta? What can we learn from the place the variant was discovered, South Africa, and what does their data mean for the UK? 

Today on The Fourcast, we speak to our Health and Social Care Editor Victoria Macdonald to hear how our hospitals are coping; Shabir Madhi, a professor of vaccinology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to analyse the Omicron data from South Africa, and Professor Ravi Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, who warns that the South Africa data might not be particularly relevant to the UK after all.

Sources: BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4 News