You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. And today I'm talking to

Rupert Beale, clinician scientist group leader at the Francis Crick Institute, who's written a series of pieces for the LRB on COVID-19 in the two years and more since the

start of the pandemic, most recently on the Omicron variant at the start of that wave.

He's also a veteran of this podcast. Hello, Rupert, and thank you for finding the time to talk to us again.

Hello, Tom. So we are now officially living with COVID.

What does that mean?

Yeah, it's a phrase I don't particularly like,

but it's the one that seems to be popular,

perhaps popularized a little bit.

What it means is treating COVID as if it were more or less any

of the other seasonal, usually infections that we get with respiratory viruses. Veteran listeners

to this podcast will have heard me talk about the four seasonal coronaviruses that we've known about

for many years that do occasionally

cause serious medical problems, but it's very rare that they cause serious medical

medical problems, given that we're all infected with these usually multiple times through our

lifetime. And if you had been sort of betting on the idea that SARS-CoV-2 would eventually settle down to become

the fifth of the seasonal coronaviruses, I think you'd be feeling that your bet was a pretty good one.

It does look as though that's where we're likely to end up.

I should say we're not really there yet.

SARS-COV-2 is still causing substantial problems

in healthcare in the NHS. What it's not doing is causing the same sort of societal threat

where a collapse in healthcare could have occurred had we not acted in the way that we did,

...