"Precautionary". Yeah right. A synonym for ignorant, fearful, controlling and panicked.
Nothing is known about the virulence or lethality of this variant. It's just different. As was delta. We panicked over delta too, until it became clear that neither wrapping a hankie over your mouth nor hiding behind the sofa made much difference.
I really thought we had escaped the cold dead hand of Whitty and his ilk, but apparently we are still very much under the thumb and can look forward to many more years of being unable to plan ahead or reliably anticipate having lives that are worth living. But we won't resist, because we are secretly a nation of schoolchildren who rather fancy being disciplined and told what to do, solidly leavened with the pathetically and chronically anxious who find life too difficult even when there isn't a bug circulating.
These latest restrictions, despite seeming moderate in the context of the greater authoritarianism of recent years, are likely the final nail in the coffin for anything resembling normality ever returning. If two cases and some scaremongering about genetic variation are justification enough to essentially close the borders, ruin everyone's holidays and put us back in maundering terror of others by unilateral diktat, what could ever be the justification for removing those restrictions and the powers that support them?
Time to buy shares in the PCR testing companies. Oh, wait, they're all private and owned by Tory donors. Never mind, I suppose they needed a boost over Christmas.
What's the betting that none of this will be reviewed until well into the New Year, soundly ruining everyone's Christmas for a second time? There'll be a paper in a week or so that likely shows Omicron to be a storm in a teacup, but they won't react to that with anything like the same speed, because Michie and her ilk crew would rather lock us down forever if they could. Amazing to think that we'll look back with nostalgia on a few blessed weeks where we could travel reasonably easily, provided we had our vaccination papers, filled out a staggeringly intrusive form, took a meaningless but still expensive test and were content for every piddling apparatchik to know the details of our lives, movements, health status and genetics at whim. How those halcyon days will seem when we're back in the lockdown the government has so clearly been signalling by denying it.
A government of incompetents being puppeted by malign monomaniacs some of whom are explicitly engaged in psychological manipulation. And nothing we can do.