All it seems obvious is that big optimism has done nothing for us so far.

You know, throughout the pandemic, we've been hearing repeatedly from the earliest days, actually,

that herd immunity was just around the corner, that, you know, we were going to,

if you look at how many people who've got antibodies in their bloodstream, gosh, we'll be

out of this in a couple of months.

And it was always complete bollocks.

Our friend in Sweden, Anders Tegnell, designed the Swedish model based on the priority

of achieving that status, made various over-optimistic claims about how many people had

antibodies, was consistently wrong, just as he was wrong about

masks and everything else. Just last month, Neil Ferguson of Sage in the United Kingdom

posited that, you know, a combination of infections and vaccinations had more or less

got us to herd immunity. Then Omicron comes. Every time somebody opens them after say this might be over,

they are made to look stupid pretty quickly. And I don't blame them because in a way,

anybody who makes any firm assertive claim, and how can we not, in this this context is going to look stupid at some point

because it's just so fast moving and so complex.

My feeling, like I say, is that we're in this probably for about a decade, and it may become less sort of severe over time,

and that the question is how do we adjust the infrastructure? How do we adjust the sort of

situation with workplaces, with schools? How do we ensure there's adequate spacing, ventilation?

I mean, vaccination is obviously a big part of it, but it's not going to be adequate because

as we're seeing, Omicron has

significant escape from past infection and vaccinations, meaning that we can't rely on

pharmaceutical interventions. We're going to have to change the infrastructure. We're going to have

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