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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectators' Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Isabel Hardman and I'm joined by Katie Balls and James Forsyth.

Katie, we have more developments in the spread of the Brazilian COVID variant, which initially

had appeared to be reasonably well contained at the borders of the UK. But that doesn't seem to be

the case. Just explain what's going on here. Yes, so we know when it comes to the great unlocking

ultimately rust on several factors, and one of those is variants. So I think it's fairly troubling

news this morning in the sense that an enhanced contract tracing efforts underway

after the Brazilian variant of COVID-19 was detected. There are just a handful of cases,

but I think what's really troubling the government is one of these cases was someone who tested

positive for the new variant, but due to a failure to fill the format correctly, they haven't actually been able to

work out who this person is. So with the other cases, those individuals are self-isolating,

some are in Scotland, some are in England, but there was a rogue individual with the Brazilian

variant. Now, while I think it is obviously worrying with new variants, I think we shouldn't get

too ahead of ourselves because ultimately it's still a very, very small handful. And we've seen

with a South African variant that was more cases of, that there was surge testing and other things.

You can seem to get it under control. It doesn't mean this is about to become the dominant

variant by any means. But I think it does touch

onto a wider debate, which is the government has held really firm on the idea they're not

going to do quarantine hotels for everyone arriving in the UK. Scotland does want to do that,

...