Thank you for the question. The difficulty with the omicron variant is that we don't have a fully formed picture of its overall impact. But we are genuinely concerned that it appears to spread even more rapidly than the delta variant. You'll have heard Conservative Ministers in the UK Government talk about that as well, but about the fact that collectively within the UK we don't understand the three main points of difficulty. On the first, we have some impacts, but we don't understand how much more rapidly than delta it appears to spread, but it appears to spread more rapidly; the second is whether it actually causes more harm than the delta variant, and I'll come back to that; and the third is whether it can escape the vaccine.

Now, if you put it this way: we have about 2,000-odd people every day in Wales who test positive for COVID—it's almost all delta—and we know that leads to a certain number of people coming to harm, going to hospital. Unfortunately, we know that a certain number of people won't survive. If omicron has the same impact in those, say, 2,000 people, then you'd say it's about what the scientists call the same sort of pathogenic capability. The problem is, if omicron spreads more rapidly, we'll see more people come in to our health and care system much more quickly, and that does have the real potential to cause a very serious impact, even if it doesn't actually escape the vaccine response. So, we're dealing with a good deal of uncertainty at present.

Our scientists across the UK expect to be able to provide politicians with some more information within the next two to three weeks to have an understanding of those extra factors. So, we're dealing with a point of real uncertainty at what is the most inconvenient time for many businesses, in the last few weeks in the run-up to Christmas. So, we don't plan to introduce more restrictions before Christmas, but, when we get more information on the omicron variant—not just what it entails and what it means, but also how widespread it already is within the UK. And we're not having a fully formed picture; of course, we have confirmed and probable cases, but, because a decision was made to no longer have PCR testing for international entrants about six weeks or so ago, that means we haven't been able to sequence in advance. So, it's likely that there is more omicron in the country and across the UK than we understand at present. Once we get a fuller picture of where it is and its particular impact, then not just this Government for Wales but, actually, across the UK, will need to make choices, and that's why the First Minister wrote jointly with the First Minister of Scotland to the UK Government to be clear that, if measures are needing to be taken, then we want to have the support of the UK Treasury in doing so if that impact is felt first in another part of the union that isn't England. We've seen that in the past, and I believe that a proper and sensible response to that would show the UK acting as it should do and its best to make sure that the risks and opportunities are shared equally with this latest twist in the ongoing tale of this pandemic.