Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
Yes. The number of cases involved with this variant is probably fewer than one street in Prague, but it's the unknown-ness that is the problem. Whereas Delta works in more or less predictable ways. I'm afraid that is what travel is like at the moment - a constant risk quivering away. Maybe it's better to ration yourself to one fraught check on FT a day and try and forget about it for the rest of the time?
Completely agree - the take home message is don't panic and try not to spend too much time reading the headlines. The journalists' job is to try to draw you in and get you hooked on their medium!
Yes, it is a knee-jerk response and likely futile as a variant with this number of mutations is so far away from previous lineages it can't possibly have developed in the last week and is almost certainly already globally distributed (and goodness knows about the unknown unknowns in places with no genomic sequencing) but this is the reality of policy making in times of uncertainty.
We have no idea what the policymakers will decide based on emerging evidence and there's no point even trying to guess. Just take one day at a time...
Edit: some excellent advice from the Regius:
