This in the Guardian is worth noting. There will clearly be more variants and it is not wise to assume they are going to get weaker or that existing vaccines will offer immunity. Yes, of course, adjust the precautions and the rules but be very ready to increase them or change them as the situation changes. Road maps are a great idea but if there is no map of the unexplored territory and the road ahead is shrouded in fog ..... As the early map-makers used to say "Here be monsters".
“The Omicron variant did not come from the Delta variant. It came from a completely different part of the virus’s family tree. And since we don’t know where in the virus’s family tree a new variant is going to come from, we cannot know how pathogenic it might be. It could be less pathogenic but it could, just as easily, be more pathogenic,” he said.
This point was backed by virologist Prof Lawrence Young of Warwick University. “People seem to think there has been a linear evolution of the virus from Alpha to Beta to Delta to Omicron,” he told the
Observer. “But that is simply not the case. The idea that virus variants will continue to get milder is wrong. A new one could turn out to be even more pathogenic than the Delta variant, for example.”
‘There seems to be the perception that immunocompromised people are very old and very sick and it doesn’t really matter’: Ceinwen Giles, who has reduced immunity after cancer treatment
David Nabarro, a special envoy on Covid-19 for the World
Health Organization, also highlighted the uncertainty of how future variants might behave: “There will be more variants after Omicron and if they are more transmissible they will dominate. In addition, they may cause different patterns of illness, in other words they may turn out to be more lethal or have more long-term consequences.”
See:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ead-caution-covid-restrictions-lifted-england