The virus, like others, will mutate and huge volumes of infected people gives it ample opportunity to do this. Only by reducing those infection volumes will the mutation numbers fall, thus making fewer that could be variants of concern.
The virus will be around for years, possibly forever. It's unlikely that International travel will be stopped.
We can certainly retain measures to control what may enter the country. The UK is ahead of most countries with vaccination, so we're vulnerable without restrictions.
Restrictions and the vaccines will be the 2 tools that everywhere has. I'm assuming that a graded response, depending on where travellers have been, will continue for a few years. Perhaps travellers from the EU, once safer, and similar locations, will just require negative test results.
In the meantime, we need to make it affordable for people here to isolate, when infected. As we're not eradicating the virus, if it remains a problem, it only continues if people are socially active, including being at work or out and about.
There's discussion that once projected impacts are similar to an illness like flu, that it may become an unwelcome fact of life, that we wouldn't do much about, apart from having the vaccines and monitoring the world for dangerous variants. We may mirror the approaches taken elsewhere, so that we don't become less inviting as a destination. |