The extraordinary row between Australia and the tennis champion Novak Djokovic illustrates the absurdity of Covid travel restrictions in the age of the omicron variant. Australia requires arrivals to provide proof of their vaccination status. Mr Djokovic apparently has not been jabbed. He has been detained in a hotel in Melbourne and is now threatened with deportation.

Perhaps this might be reasonable if Australia still had very low rates of domestic transmission and its population was largely unjabbed. But daily case numbers are running in the tens of thousands due to an omicron surge and, after a slow start, most people now have had the vaccine.

So what exactly is Australia trying to keep out? Moreover, what is the point of hosting a major sporting event if you are not prepared to let one of the leading figures in that sport compete? The country is lumbered with restrictions that no longer make any rational sense, but which have nonetheless become totems of a failed zero Covid strategy that are difficult politically to unwind.

The UK has to some extent avoided this fate, and is beginning to dismantle some of its own travel curbs. In other areas, however, we remain subject to a range of anti-Covid measures, many of them introduced to counteract omicron, with no clear strategy for removing them once that threat has passed.

At what point will it be judged “safe” for children to no longer be required to wear masks in school? How will Covid passes be scaled back, and then scrapped? What is the future of mass-testing in a population in which the vast majority have already had the vaccine, and many millions have been boosted? There are, at present, no obvious answers, nor indeed any obvious criteria under which these measures will be withdrawn.

That is not acceptable. The risk is not just that the UK shares Australia’s fate, and persists with restrictions long after they have become ridiculous. It is that the availability of these so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions becomes an excuse not to engage in the difficult business of building resilience into the system, particularly the health service, so that it is never threatened with being overwhelmed ever again.

Omicron is unlikely to be the last variant of Covid-19 to test us. Are we to reach for restrictions every time a worrying strain emerges?