[ritchiebaby]

I'm not sure thats how a vaccines effectiveness is gauged Ritchie ?

Of course you are right about being cautious, we are going to be one great Petri dish at the moment with infections raging through the younger population. There is always the risk that a really dangerous mutation could develop. Also the risk of long covid is something that shouldn't be taken lightly.

But whilst people are not being hospitalised or dying in any great numbers people are just going to go for some kind of normality again, and I doubt there is much the politicians can do to stop them now.

I'm not sure how else you can realistically guage it, jim, but I'm open to being educated/corrected. I suppose the case of Andrew Marr, who caught Covid after being double vaccinated, is the most high-profile example.

The other statistic I often quote is that even using the latest worrying figures, less than 1% of the population has tested positive. Allowing for an assumed understatement of 10 times for those not tested, at least 90% are free from Covid, so should be able to go about their business safely.

The elephant in the room is that too many who should be self-isolating are not. I could quote many examples in my rural environment and I can only imagine it is probably worse in towns and cities. As you infer, I think we are too far down the road of relaxing restrictions to have any hope of having any control over the spread of the virus.