Everyone think for a moment. Twice now in the UK we’ve seen that the number of infections falls very fast when social restrictions are applied. We’ve seen China suppress a massive outbreak and get it almost under control; their lockdown ended months ago, and now they’re on track, trace and quarantine.
If the “more developed” nations had followed the WHO’s warning and China’s example and vigorously suppressed this virus in February, SARS-CoV-2 would have been deprived of hundreds of millions of hosts, and these new variants would have had almost no opportunity to develop, nor to spread.
The longer we leave it, the more we let it spread and the worse it gets! In this sense it is very much like global warming, “a stitch in time saves nine”; even our great grannies knew that. But then they repaired things for themselves instead of forever throwing stuff “away” (wherever that is) and buying new all the time.