AS the NHS braces itself for what Health Secretary Humza Yousaf described this week as an "extremely challenging season", one of the questions is how much of that challenge is likely to come from Covid.

There are a few ways to look at this.

On the one hand, given that this is our third winter with the virus and our second in which a majority of the population has been vaccinated - many several times - our immune defences against severe disease and death are substantially higher than they were back in 2020.
This is illustrated by the fact that by April of this year, according to data from NHS Grampian, the proportion of Covid positive patients being admitted to hospital because of the infection had fallen to just 20 per cent (compared to 57% as recently as the beginning of January this year).

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