[yurlungur]

Yeah it really depends on how the numbers match up and how much risks you are willing to take given the degree of confidence in those numbers.

By current accounts the vaccines will still work against this variant. So the last thing you want to happen is for the virus to catch the vulnerables in the last moment before they are vaccinated and essentially renders the whole vaccination program ineffective.

Of course there's the debate of this whole pandemic about the harm to economy and people's lives etc. To me the majority of the damage has already been done and can't be undone. So I'd like the measures to be taken to end this ASAP, even if they are even stricter, and to mitigate the harm as much as possible. But I highly doubt that's what's going to happen. The actual policy effects may be neither here nor there.

[dehrmann]

> By current accounts the vaccines will still work against this variant

This isn't surprising because the variant hasn't really encountered the vaccines yet, so it's not an adaptation to them.