【明報專訊】My university just recorded the highest number of daily COVID cases since the start of the pandemic: 58 cases. This massive spike in cases came from Thanksgiving when everyone went home, despite the student population being 99% vaccinated. At this point, it seems almost ludicrous to talk about ''the end of the pandemic'' when new variants are constantly emerging, evading our vaccines more quickly than we can get them injected into our arms. The new Omicron variant and the Delta variant also highlight our weakness: it doesn't suffice that 60-70% of the rich world are fully vaccinated or even boosted by a third vaccine if people in the developing world haven't even received their first dose. Making sure that vaccines are accessible to more people is not only an altruistic act, but also a self-interested one. Moreover, it shows that our COVID policies must be sustainable and tenable. A 21-day quarantine is extreme, seeing that it usually takes 3.71 days to test positive for Delta. As Professor Ben Cowling at HKU put it, ''I know of no scientific evidence to justify a 21-day quarantine period. 10 days with an exit test should be enough, 14 days more than enough.'' There were 163,233 passenger arrivals in Hong Kong from June to August 2021, and only 2 tested positive on day 19. Of these two people, one was immediately discharged from hospital, suggesting that the virus was from a past infection and not contagious. The other could well have been an infection from the hotel, just like how one guest recently caught Omicron from their South African neighbour in a quarantine hotel. The 14-day quarantine was good enough. We should be more worried about airport staff being in contact with arrivals. In my own experience, I was within six feet of many of them when I arrived at the airport. We must be cautious about Omicron, but at the same time, we need to accept that COVID is not temporary and think hard about how we will live with it in the long term.