The Guardian view on facing Omicron: the public may be ahead of the PM | Editorial
S ince 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. The good news is that we are not back at square one: the variant is very unlikely to fully escape vaccines. This is why the government is once more counting on their power.