The Omicron variant of coronavirus is now circulating within the community, the UK's health secretary has confirmed. Sajid Javid told MPs today that "multiple regions of England" were seeing cases of the variant that were not linked to international travel.
And he said he could not guarantee the variant would not "knock us off our road to recovery", as he said "the window between infection and infectiousness may be shorter for the Omicron".
Earlier, Professor Paul Hunter, from the school of medicine at the University of East Anglia, had warned the Omicron variant could be spreading faster than a previous variant, Delta.