Boris Johnson says he is adopting a proportionate response. Is he doing enough to head off the risk?
Since the beginning of 2020, we have all become used to living with uncertainty: estimating relative risks; thinking of how to protect ourselves and others; attempting to plot out lives in which school, jobs, travel and time with loved ones have a question mark attached.
Now that uncertainty has increased again. The World Health Organization has said that the Omicron variant poses a very high global risk of infection surges. Experts suggest that it will take around a fortnight before the extent of the threat it poses becomes clearer, in terms of how much it sickens those it infects and how well existing vaccines perform against it. The chief executive of the US drugmaker Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, has warned that “there is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness of vaccines] is the same level” as with Delta.
