Reading all this is getting to me. When do we admit that we aren't going to have total protection and just get on with life? They don't even know how many different variants they have cause they aren't testing to know. How many different variants of the Brazilian variant is there and how many other countries have their dozen variants. It's what viruses do!
When is enough enough that we just say it's ducked up but we've gotta move on and we can't live indefinitely in bubbles.
I've said it over and over again we aren't even looking at what happened just at ordinary people living their lives and accusing them of not behaving properly, instead of say "why the fuck did this happen, how could we not prevent it getting from China to Ireland? How do we make sure it never happens again?"
People seem to be all to happy to accept that being locked down like this ruining local small businesses in the hospitality sector not seeing family or friends or socialising, is an ok consequence for having market access to the EU, China etc etc which meant we couldn't control our border and still can't.