Or is it like the moment in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe where the snow begins to melt and the wicked witch starts to lose her power?

Look at all these amazing things. For the first time in 21 months the Cabinet considered the damage to society, the economy and human civilisation that would result from yet another effort to scare us all into cowering in our homes.

And, for a few days at least, it restrained itself from smashing another few hundred tottering businesses, or bringing despair to the lonely and old, or fouling up the school and university educations of yet more young people.

For once, these panic-driven ninnies sucked at their knuckles and wondered: ‘Is burning down the house really a sane and rational response to finding a wasps’ nest?’

On Thursday, a prominent BBC presenter wondered out loud whether a ‘Covid hospitalisation’ actually meant that the person involved was in hospital for Covid rather than something else.

I hope for the sake of his career that he does not carry on using his brain in such a dangerous fashion.

Before he knows where he is he will be asking if so-called ‘cases’ are really just positive test results, often not involving any illness at all, and, mainly reflecting the State’s costly efforts in testing everyone it can get its hands on.

And if he ever wonders on air about what is counted as a ‘Covid death’, then he’ll end up in exile at BBC Radio Skegness, interviewing seals.

Then there was the Twitter exchange between Covid modeller Professor Graham Medley and The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson.

In this encounter, this respected expert more or less admitted that the Government expected him to model only the worst-case scenarios.

As the expert put it: ‘Decision-makers are generally only interested in situations where decisions have to be made.’ Ah, you might think. Is that so?

And on top of that came an article from the prominent Left-wing commentator Owen Jones.

In this he recognised that those who doubt the need for shutting down society may not after all be mad saboteurs and cranks.

Or, as he put it: ‘We must acknowledge that the waning support of the wider public cannot simply be dismissed as Covid denialism. Or as conspiratorial delusion and heartless contempt for human life.’

Well, as my late mother would have said, that is damned nice of him. I never did like being told that I did not care about human life, and still think that those who made this accusation against me and other doubters disgraced themselves.

Mr Jones’s audience are mainly youthful. He can see a trend when he wants to and now says of his young readers that ‘the risk to their lives has been very low’ – a point that people such as me have made from the beginning, even though I am myself old.

He adds: ‘Yet the ability to socialise or establish relationships in their best years has been criminalised; their educations have been injured; their mental health more damaged than that of older generations.’ All very true, and not just of the young.

FINALLY, Mr Jones declared that ‘the false dichotomy between harsh authoritarian measures or mass death must be abandoned for good’.

Well, so it must. As we approach the second anniversary of the greatest episode of collective hysteria in our history, it is noticeable how little has been achieved by all the incredibly damaging, unprecedented measures taken.

And how clever Sweden, which refused to go mad, has (I put this mildly) not done significantly worse than we did.

Sweden showed the self-disciplined calm for which we as a people and a nation were once famous.

Yet we still have many among us, in positions of great power, who want to carry on doing things which have not worked, in the hope that it will be different the next time.

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