Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the show. Now, we've not done a specific show on COVID for

a little while. Did that smack of slight complacency perhaps? Perhaps we should have talked about

this a little bit earlier. The reason we're doing the show today, or the kind of the hot,

I suppose, is the immediate situation in India, which is being at the moment devastated by a second

wave of COVID-19, and a variant, which I'll explain what I mean by this, under investigation,

for those who don't know what it means, which has been identified. Now, let's just have a quick

summary before, and I should explain, I've got, as ever, some absolutely fantastic guests today,

a brilliant journalist live from New Delhi, who will tell us exactly what's going on on the ground,

and will also join by two really fantastic experts, who will explain, and this will be a very

educational experience for me, as well as everybody else to have good cyber analysis of exactly

what's happening, what the threat is. Now, in India, there was around 235,000 new cases reported

in a 24-hour period, 14 and a half million cases altogether in the second biggest country on

a second only to the United States, Delhi is reporting already hospital bed shortages. Now,

the new strain, let's just have a quick, and we've got experts to talk about this, don't worry,

but a new strain reported in India is B1, 617, and the reason it has called some alarm is there are

two mutations on it, which could make it, could, and it's very important, I am so could here,

make it spread faster and potentially evade the body's immune system. Now, how much that's

fueling the second wave in India is not actually altogether clear. Now, we say very under investigation,

because it's not yet, and it may not end up be a variant of concern. Now, we've all heard, we've

got used to hearing about variant of concern because of South Africa and Brazil. So, scientists are

trying to just establish exactly how serious the strain is. Now, as you may well know, dozens of

cases of this particular strain have now been identified here in the UK, and they are going up.

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