Are We Heading For Lockdown?
The Owen Jones Podcast
Owen Jones
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2021
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nearly two years after COVID-19 was identified, and a year after mass vaccination began, Britain could be on the brink of another lockdown. How did we get here? How serious is Omicron? Is it intrinsically milder, will our antibodies keep it mild, will it cause less severe illness, hospitalisation and death - and what does the evidence from abroad tell us?
We're joined by the Financial Times' brilliant John Burn-Murdoch - whose data and analysis has been a lifeline through the pandemic - to guide us through the current crisis.
Plus: Director of CLASS Ellie Mae O'Hagan talks us through the politics of the current moment - will a pandemic-weary public really stand for another lockdown, what does the Tory crisis mean for public health - and what comes next?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, hi, everyone. Welcome to a very special show. Originally, we were going to be at 12 o'clock, |
| 0:13.0 | give the couple of guests, but they have got COVID-19, which I'm sure many of you looking around |
| 0:18.8 | your friendship groups, people at work, there's a pretty similar pattern at the moment. Now, it's nearly |
| 0:24.7 | two years since a cluster of unexplained pneumonia cases was identified in Wuhan province in China. |
| 0:32.1 | Since then, the virus identified a secure acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus two, which we |
| 0:39.1 | have all come to known as COVID, has officially killed over five million people globally. |
| 0:45.2 | That's likely to be a drastic underestimate, according to the economist, which has been tracking |
| 0:51.4 | excess deaths, the most reliable indicator of how many people have died. Around 18.2 million are |
| 0:58.8 | likely to have died in less than two years of the biggest public health emergency since the |
| 1:04.3 | Spanish flu. Up to 21.3 million, a death toll comparable to that of World War I, which was spread |
| 1:13.1 | over four years. Now, it's a year since mass vaccination began, yet here we are all over again, |
| 1:20.8 | talking about potential severe restrictions already, Netherlands has gone into a harsh lockdown. |
| 1:28.0 | That's thanks to Omicron. Now, except for aficionados of the Greek alphabet, that was not something |
| 1:33.8 | we were talking about until about three weeks ago, and yet it's now the dominant strain here in the |
| 1:39.6 | United Kingdom. So, how bad is Omicron? What is the data telling us, illness, hospitalization, death? |
| 1:49.6 | What do we know from data abroad, and what do we think this means for the current situation, |
| 1:55.7 | for the National Health Service, and how we have escaped this? Now, we're going to be joined now |
| 2:02.4 | by the fantastic John Bernardoke, the financial times you have, has really been a lifeline |
| 2:07.7 | for myself, and so many of those data, data crunching, analysis, all the way through lockdown. |
| 2:12.8 | I'll just bring in John straight away. John, thanks for joining us, not least during all of this. |
| 2:17.8 | You're doing well, I hopefully, hopefully, so far. |
| 2:22.7 | I've somehow remained Covid-free for the whole two years, as far as I know, so... |
... |
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