Those of you who have been paying attention may well be able to recall that I have been less than impressed with the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic.

Last week I admitted I wasn’t happy with the government lifting all coronavirus health protections.

I said I believed the clinically vulnerable have been left exposed and become virtual prisoners in their own homes because there is absolutely no way of protecting themselves other than keeping away from everyone else.

I said I was dismayed at the ending of self-isolation for people testing positive for Covid and asked how people are meant to be careful when free lateral flow testing is being stopped.

As an aside, I have been trying to order a pack of lateral flow tests from the government website for more than a week now and repeatedly received the message that no delivery slots were available. So like millions of others, I’m just going to have to wing it and hope for the best.

(Before the government apologists get on their high horses, yes the vaccine roll-out was really good but dare I suggest that was because of the NHS and its army of volunteers.)

I make no apologies for mentioning the pandemic again. Despite what the government is trying to tell you, it has not gone away yet. And in the absence of any public health mitigations, it is not going away any time soon.

The government insists we have to ‘learn to live with Covid’. But what are the real world implications of simply pretending everything is OK now?

Well in the real world, everything is very much not OK. The infection rate is soaring, with the Office for National Statistics survey indicating around a million new infections in a just a week.

That infection rate is equating to almost 1,000 deaths a week of people who died within 28 days of a positive test. And there will be more deaths to come as the number of people admitted to hospital with Covid surged by more than 17 per cent.

I know many of you are bored of Covid now. You have other things to worry about, not least of which is the cost of living crisis.

I understand that in your list of priorities, finding the money to pay your massively increased gas bill could well take priority over an illness you may or may not get which may or may not make you very ill and which may or may not see you on a ventilator in intensive care.

This is especially so when the ignorant and ill-informed are only too happy to tell you that Omicron ‘is just like a bad cold’, an opinion based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever apart from what their mate told them on Facebook.

Or you could be like the woman interviewed on BBC North West News last week who happily told the reporter: “I don’t believe in Covid. It’s just flu with a fancy name.”

Strangely, that doesn’t quite marry up with the opinion of Professor Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for England, who said last week: “If we look at hospitalisations, there are now quite significant numbers of people in hospital. They are now rising again so there is pressure on the NHS.

“It is currently being driven by Omicron rather than new variants, but we need to keep a very close eye on this because at any point new variants could emerge anywhere in the world, including the UK, as happened with the Alpha variant.”

That doesn’t sound like a man who believes the pandemic is over.

Closer to home, coronavirus is ripping through schools, causing untold problems in its wake.

Cheshire East Council has had to contact the Department for Education about the growing pressure on schools as teachers continue to pick up Covid from pupils, as reported by Local Democracy Reporter Belinda Ryan.

Director of education Jacky Forster told the council’s children and families committee last week that Covid was having a bigger impact in primary schools than secondary schools at present.

She said: “While the rates are higher among our younger people, the majority are still asymptomatic or may be ill for a couple of days but not long-term illnesses, so it's not having a significant impact on the children.”

But she said it was spreading to teachers and other staff and ‘that is causing some pressures in a number of our schools’.

She said schools were working with each other to try and overcome the problem but it was ‘very challenging’.

“We have escalated the staffing issue to the DfE to make sure that they’re absolutely sighted that they know this is a big issue for us in the sector,” said Mrs Forster.

Yes, this is what ‘learning to live with Covid’ really looks like.