The rising number of Covid-19 infections poses a significant threat to the UK's ability to run trains, buses, hospitals and other key services.
They say that more and more people face going into quasar and that could have grave consequences. The isolation times for those who test positive for sars-coV-2 have been reduced to reduce the pressure on the industry.
Is this reduction justified? Is there room for even more cuts to the US's scurvy program? The answers to these questions could determine how quickly the nation emerges from the wave of Covid-19 cases it is currently experiencing.
There are rules for self-isolating after a positive result.
If you get two negative flow test results in a row, you can stop self-isolating after seven days in England and Northern Ireland. The 10-day limit is still in force in Scotland and Wales.
There is no evidence that this reduced period of self-isolation is enough to stop people from infecting others.
Billy Quilty of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says that people who get Covid-19 are most infectious early on.
Someone who develops symptoms or tests positive for a disease may have already been infectious for a day or two. They are on day seven or eight of their infection after five days of isolation. We estimate that there is a low risk associated with isolation periods of five days or more.
Is Omicron different from previous versions in terms of its infectiousness?
Scientists think Omicron may be more infectious than previous versions. We need to find out if that is the case as soon as possible. If this becomes a very acute staffing crisis, we need to make sure that people are not isolating for an unnecessarily long time.
Dame Anne Johnson is an epidemiologist at University College London.
There is a lot of variability in how infectious people are. We need to face the fact that we can't eliminate all risk, so we need more studies to understand when it's reasonable for people to be released fromQuarantine.
Johnson wanted to see more data on the distribution of viral loads in different people and at different times of their infections. She said that we need to better understand how infectious individuals are likely to be at different times.
What is the long-term outlook for the latest variant?
Most scientists are more positive about the impact of Omicron, though they are concerned about the short-term effect on hospital stays. It takes time to build up immunity in a population that has not been exposed to a virus before, so that people will not get sick.
If we don't get a new variant that is so different that it causes a lot of disease, that's the general direction we are travelling in.
