All staff and students in secondary schools, colleges and universities should wear a face covering indoors where social distancing is not possible.

If you’re a contact of someone who may have been infected with the Omicron variant, you must self-isolate for 10 days, regardless of your vaccination status or age.

If you’re fully vaccinated and travelling to Wales from abroad, you must take a day 2 PCR test and self-isolate until you receive a negative result.

Even before the discovery of the new variant, people with underlying health conditions were being widely ignored, despite case numbers remaining high. Months after the official shielding programme ended, Office for National Statistics data from October showed almost one in four clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) people were still shielding, while 68% were leaving the house but taking extra precautions.

Many CEV people tell me they’re bracing against the cold and only socialising outdoors, while others aren’t seeing loved ones at all. As one young man with cerebral palsy and asthma, who is not leaving his flat other than for vaccine appointments, told me: “I feel like a hamster on a wheel. If anything, the isolation of shielding is getting more entrenched than ever before by the rest of the population returning to ‘normal’.”

Ministers have only made matters worse. Over the past few months, the government has removed many measures that would have helped clinically vulnerable people. In England, the legal requirement to wear a mask ended as far back as July, apart from in healthcare settings and care homes. Once furlough ended in October, clinically vulnerable people had fewer options to shield themselves. Many were sent back to packed offices or public-facing roles, without the legal right to work from home or still be paid if they couldn’t.

Since August, close contacts of people in England who test positive for Covid haven’t had to self-isolate if they have been double-vaccinated. The government appears to have little interest in either preventing or tracking non-hospitalised Covid cases – a strategy that is dangerous to even vaccinated clinically vulnerable people in the UK, who must try to avoid contracting Covid in a population where 1 million people currently have the virus.

The government clearly believes vaccines – and the booster programme in particular – can form its main line of defence, but while the rollout is providing huge relief, it is not a silver bullet. More than 100,000 extremely vulnerable people are yet to have their third jab after confusion over who is eligible. Medication or certain health problems mean two in five people who have impaired immune systems have a “low or undetectable” antibody response after being double vaccinated, meaning they in particular require a “vaccine plus” strategy – such as masks and increased distancing – to feel safer. The consequences of all this can’t be ignored: millions of people with underlying health conditions are being shut out from public life.