We’re being proportionate and precautionary. Obviously we don’t know completely what this variant is going to do. We know it seems to be quite infectious, but we don’t know yet exactly how difficult it’s going to be for people’s bodies to cope with it. Research is ongoing. We’ve got world beating science, you know, world leading scientists who will be able to give us those answers over the next two or three weeks.
In the meantime, what the Prime Minister has said said is, let’s be careful, right, let’s take it steady. Let’s make sure we’re masked in certain areas where we think there’s likely to be transmission. Let’s think about travel more carefully and make sure we do testing at the border to restrict the virus coming into buy us a bit more time. But fundamentally, let’s be proportionate and get on with our lives to some extent and try and have as merry a Christmas as we possibly can. So we’re learning as we go.
Don’t forget Omicron is quite a way down the alphabet. That means between delta and now we’ve been through a number of variants that haven’t got very far. Let’s see where this one goes.
