England hospitals still flat as a pancake!
Numbers are still fairly flat - having shown signs of a rise but then stabilised a bit again over the past few days of data. If this trend continues, that's obviously enormously encouraging and would see the hospital admission rate continue to be revised downwards. That's what we want - really, what we need - to see to justify moving to Step 4.
While this data is UK-wide, I do want to talk a little bit about the differences between the four nations. Because we're starting to see quite big disparities in hospital numbers.
In England, hospital occupancy is currently dead flat, and has been for a while: an utterly straight line in terms of the number of people in English hospitals with covid at any given time, at very manageable numbers.
In Scotland, it's a very different story. Hospital occupancy has been rising there for about a month now, with worrying signs of exponential growth in recent admission figures - with numbers more than doubling over the past three weeks.
And in Wales - well, whatever's in the Welsh water, we need to be drinking it across the four nations. Despite a small rise in cases, Welsh hospital admissions have been absolutely nosediving over the past couple of weeks and there are now only twenty-odd covid patients in hospital across the whole of the country.