A professor of immunology and member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), has said that the public should not worry about the prospect of the Omicron variant cancelling Christmas just yet.
When asked by Sky News whether Christmas would be cancelled this year, Paul Moss said: “I don’t think we need to worry too much about that at this stage… the measures that we got in place have a good chance of gaining some control here.
“The two ways that we’re adopting to try and control this are: one, in behavioural change to reduce transmission: the travel restrictions; more lateral flows; masking.
“And the second big factor is the immunity and we know that we may lose some immunity with this virus. So what is happening is we are boosting our immune levels to super-high levels with the plans that were introduced yesterday, and that should retain some protection.
“What we’ve seen with Covid is that things change very rapidly. And I think we need at least three weeks to assess this.
“We need excellent epidemiology and within the laboratory people are testing the resistance of the virus against vaccinated samples. So we will need that sort of time. And we will know a lot more before Christmas.”