Coronapod: Does England's COVID strategy risk breeding deadly variants?
Nature Podcast
podcast@nature.com
4.5 • 893 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2021
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The UK government has announced that virtually all COVID restrictions will be removed in England on Monday 18th July. This will do away with social distancing requirements, allow businesses to re-open to full capacity and remove legal mask mandates. This decision comes, however, amidst soaring infections rates in the country, driven by the delta variant.
Now scientists are questioning the wisdom of this policy and asking whether the combination of high transmission and a partially vaccinated population could provide the perfect breeding ground for vaccine-resistant variants - a possibility which could have devastating global consequences.
News: Why England’s COVID ‘freedom day’ alarms researchers
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Transcript
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| 0:34.1 | didn't feel like you could be yourself, like you were hiding behind a mask. |
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| 0:57.2 | That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. |
| 1:02.4 | Welcome to CoronaPod. |
| 1:05.8 | In this show, we're going to bring you Nature's take on the latest COVID-19 developments. |
| 1:11.7 | And we'll be speaking to experts around the world about research during the pandemic. |
| 1:18.0 | We're entering a new era now. We have new COVID strategies. There's some new unknowns, and we've got a |
| 1:24.0 | vaccine. |
| 1:30.4 | Hello and welcome to CoronaPod. |
| 1:34.7 | I'm Noah Baker, and joining me this week is veteran science reporter Phil Ball. |
| 1:35.4 | Phil, how are you? |
| 1:36.8 | I'm very well, thanks, Noah. |
| 1:42.0 | So usually on CoronaPod, we try to talk about stories which are as global as possible. |
| 1:49.5 | We know that people from all over the world listen to CoronaPod. And yet this week, we're going to focus very much on the UK, which is where Phil and I both are. And that's because much of a scientific world is currently looking |
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