In the UK, my view is the action to take was very clearly to dial back the public's expectations of having a 5 day "free for all" period of relaxation of our restrictions over Christmas.

This 5 day period, as originally planned, was going to lead to massive cross-country travel, plenty of it being completely unnecessary, with no doubt a lot of risk taking in the spirit of "it's Christmas" and an inevitable huge spike of cases and deaths in the weeks that followed.

I mean I love Christmas, but I can cope with not having 5 days of partying for just one year... *

As it happens, the government did take action to dial this back at the very last minute to allow just 1 day of relaxed rules (Christmas Day) rather than the week that was originally on the table. In my view they should have been planning for this right from the start and they unnecessarily screwed up a lot of people's Christmas plans by leaving it until the very last minute to make this change.

Now even if the variant turns out to be a "non issue" (and we still have rising numbers anyway), I think it's better that they took this action to further limit Christmas (as tough as it is for everyone) rather than take the "wait and see" or "hope for the best" approach, both of which seem to have been UK govnt strategies at one time or another during 2020.

* I'm being slightly flippant here. This is clearly a tough time for a lot of people, and many families will be spending Christmas apart and will find this very hard for all sorts of reasons.