New year 2023 travel heralds the largest annual migration on earth, an event associated with reconciliation and hope while COVID is rife. Let-it-rip policies imply reconciliation to the hope that new variants will just go away without significant harm and loss of life.
In December 2022 nearly half of the passengers on two flights to Milan were found to have the virus.
Because of “Alarming antibody evasion properties of rising SARS-CoV-2 BQ and XBB subvariants” avoiding infection makes sense. Because vaccines only provide temporary immunity, because vaccines are not keeping up with variants and because monoclonal antibodies are inactive against new variants (BQ.1, BQ.1.1, XBB, and XBB.1 are the most resistant SARS-CoV-2 variants to date) we need a different strategy.