I know this might seem like bullshit, but even by next winter global vaccine uptake will get higher and higher, we will go from less than 50% global uptake to somewhere much higher, and with that the virus will have much less room to mutate.

It’s all well and good having a country with a high vaccination rate, but if that’s not true of other places in the world, and a strain develops there which can escape our vaccines, that doesn’t mean that will always be the case.

Next winter we might have a global vaccine rate of upwards of 80%, many of those vaccines could be engineered with omicron in mind, which would make something like the next omicron much less likely to happen.

We may have to accept setbacks with infectious variants that escape vaccines for a while, but we are gaining ground on the virus in a way that means this can be overcome to the point that restrictions may not be an annual affair.