Not for the majority of those who are spreading the disease. The younger key workers. People who probably won't be vaccinated until later in the year.
This is where levels of natural immunity start to come into the equation again. We know that the total herd immunity approach was attractive to them but the numbers did not come anywhere close to adding up, cannot pursue that policy in totality without hospital demand exceeding capacity many times over. But that doesnt stop a lesser version of the same phenomenon from being part of the mix. ie the idea that a fair percentage of those whose occupation or other circumstances means they've been on the front lines of exposure in the pandemic waves experiecned so far. From the viruses point of view there are likely many less susceptible candidates in that population than there were at the start, and even if this is not enough to make enough of a difference to push things below key tipping points, it still contributes to some degree. eg it would change the modelling of what could happen next.
Recently I have heard about, but not properly looked into, the idea that cases, hsopitalisation etc are falling faster than the authorities had hoped/expected. I am pleased about that but am always waiting to make sure it continues at impressive pace rather than the decline starting to slow or levels getting stuck at some still high rate.
Assuming such rates continue to fall substantially, then the next thing I will want to see is what happens once schools have been reopened for a while. Because it does seem possible to me that spread in schools, involving settings that were mostly shut in the first lockdown but not in the November national measures period, and thus 'fresh' populations exposed, may have contributed significantly to the explosion in cases then seen in December, even though the new variant aspect alone got most of the attention. This could even explain why cases are now falling more rapidly than expected, if school spread was responsible for a part of what was instead attributed to the new variant in general.
Anyway, point is that I dont feel like I can form an opinion on when the right time for other stuff to reopen should be until we have lived with the schools reopen for a bit. And I dont have an opinion of what will happen with infections when schools are open, things could go wrong but it is also reasonable to anticipate that the virus has lost a vast amount of momentum due to a combination of factors, and that even if more things go wrong in future, it would still take quite a long time for the virus to start to regain momentum.
