In part I agree with you @RedToothBrush we are now past the point of no return because they have lost the fear in the public as we have 40k cases per day and life is back to ‘normal’. Seeing elderly people, obese, sick people and disabled ones carrying on without masks going about their lives in crowded Christmas markets and theatres is just astounding to me just with Delta.
Regardless of the new variant, things were bad before but the perception of risk has been diminished somewhat and folks tend to accept high cases and a steady death toll for better or worse reliant only on vaccines and trusting those around them aren’t ignoring positive PCR results.
My concern is we seem to be approaching a perfect storm if the R is higher than Delta and vaccines are ineffective to a degree against it. We now have cold weather coupled with festive events and large gatherings for over the next month. The fallout from those was predicted to be bad enough already without this new variant in the mix, plan B was on the table watching the ‘European storm clouds’. Omicrons storm clouds may be a hurricane in comparison, true we don’t know but I’m not sure we’re in a position to confidently wait and see.
If the vaccines don’t work as well we have a good 3 months waiting for the tweaks and manufacture of boosters, that’s at least 3 months of most of our vulnerable being sitting ducks in the worst time of the year for Covid. The fallout from that could be equal if not worse than our winter wave last year (when we had mitigation’s in place), this time we have nothing in place and a Covid fatigued population.
As you say behaviours will only change if deaths and hospitalisations increase dramatically. Perhaps only then people would understand why certain activities and settings are deemed too high of a risk. By this point it may be too late and we experience a wave that could potentially engulf many more than before and have a catastrophic impact on the NHS.