Its true that the timing of updated vaccines doesnt match the pace of the evolution of the virus so far.
But its also true that the population immunity picture is not expected to go all the way back down to the 'totally naive population' situation that caused this thing to be a pandemic in the first place.
Lockdowns were an exceptional response. Even if we have evolution and waves that every so many years resemble covids equivalent of 'a very bad flu season' we wouldnt expect that sort of response, not unless it had already been demonstrated via hospital doom in another country that we really were all the way back to the equivalent of square one. I'm a 'never say never' sort of person but there is absolutely nothing showing up that would cause me to start waving around that scenario at this stage. And I say that even though we cannot yet say whether the magnitude of covids equivalent to a bad flu season will be similar or much worse than what we are used to from bad flu waves.
Plus even if we somehow ended up back in such a scenario, one of the other reasons we had lockdowns to start with was that authorities could not convincingly 'be seen to be doing something' of sufficient magnitude. Vaccines, even if they suffer from some reduction in effectiveness over time, will continue to be something authorities can point to on the 'doing something convincing' front, and thus really strong alternative 'somethings' will not be on the agenda.
In terms of other, much less drastic measures, it is questionable as to whether a country like this one is even prepared to bring back some of those. They dont want to spend the money on mass testing, they dont want the knock on effects of decreased economic activity if people change their behaviours quite radically, they dont even like to make masks mandatory in settings far beyond healthcare.
All the same, I suspect that if they saw signs of a very bad wave coming, they would still eventually do some of those lesser things, especially when if the wave timing coincides with winter NHS pressure. But we'd expect it to mostly be voluntary and a big chunk of it would be done via a change to the mood music (and the BBC etc will make this change of mood obvious if such a time arrives).
With the particular variant thats been detected in recent months, it made the authorities nervous enough to change the timing of the vaccination programme, but it is not close to changing the 'learning to live with covid' and business as usual approach. Far from it, as the following recent BBC article demonstrates:
Hospital admissions have risen since the summer and a new variant is spreading. Should we be concerned?
www.bbc.co.uk
I cant be quoting the whole thing so I'll just use the final bit to illustrate the normalisation of covid. This sort of reporting represents both the not very subtle normalisation agenda of the authorities, and the very real experiences of many people who catch the virus these days, and how those two things align much better now than they did in the pre-vaccine/pre most people having already caught it before era:
Sam, an IT worker from north London, managed to pick up infection number three on a trip to Turkey with her family this month.
"The first time was really horrible, the second time it felt like flu, but by the third time I didn't really think about it," she says.
"I just had a stinker of a cold and was all bunged up."
This is maybe what scientists meant when, at the very start of the pandemic, we were told that, one day, we would have to learn to live with Covid.
The virus is not going away.
But perhaps it is starting to become part of the background to our everyday lives.
When those sort of sentiments were chucked around by the powers that be and their media salespeople at the start of the pandemic, it demonstrated the cold calculations and priorities of the establishment here. And at that time they totally fucked it up, couldnt make that agenda work, couldnt make the hospitalisation numbers game work, couldnt sell it effectively, couldnt get enough journalists to buy into it, couldnt stop people contrasting our approach with measures taken by other countries, and they came over as absurd and monstrous and totally out of touch with reality for trying. But abandoning it was only ever going to be temporary, there would come a time where it became an easier sell and where such a stance was arguably more in touch with reality. We reached that stage a long time ago, and a new variant with some worrying properties on paper is not going to erase that quickly. Only if the most extreme eventualities arose would it even being to significantly erode this.
And whats missing from the picture painted by that bit of the article that I quoted is the same thing thats always missing or heavily deemphasised with things like seasonal flu. Emphasis is placed on what the virus means to the majority, not to the vulnerable who are still dying from it. People are not encouraged to be well informed about how many people died of covid this year, for example. And even if they were well informed about this, I doubt it would change attitudes significantly, a concerted campaign with very different mood music and the suggestion of a much broader period of looming doom would be required for that.
