No. As we did with the road map, we never looked to one single metric to decide when to act.
It is important to take a holistic approach and consider a range of data.
Obviously the number of patients in hospital is an important factor, as is the interaction with other indicators, such as the rate of increase in hospitalisations, things like the ratio of cases to hospitalisations, and the trajectory of new cases.
All of those sort of things would need to be factored in alongside vaccine effectiveness, waning immunity, etc.
It is right to look at a range of metrics and not be overly prescriptive and consider the latest advice we are getting from experts, like Prof Whitty and others.
