Covid - how worried should we be this time?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More than two years after the emergence of Covid, infection levels are high once again. The Office for National Statistics estimates that 2.7 million people, or 1 in 25 of us, have got Coronavirus.
There’s concern too about new Omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5 – mutations which help the virus re-infect our bodies.
But how worried should we actually be this time? Are the mutations normal or an alarming new development? And how much of a threat does Coronavirus still face to the NHS?
Joining David Aaronovitch in The Briefing Room are:
James Gallagher, BBC Health and Science Correspondent Gideon Skinner, Head of Politics Research in Public Affairs at Ipsos Miriam Deakin, Director of Policy and Stategy of NHS Providers Meaghan Kall, Epidemiologist at the UK Health Security Agency Neil Ferguson, Head of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College, London.
Producers: Tim Mansel, Kirsteen Knight and Simon Watts. Editor: Richard Vadon. Studio Manager: Rod Farquhar Production co-ordinators: Siobhan Reed & Helena Warwick-Cross
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.2 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. |
| 0:08.0 | The briefing room is the think spot in the metaverse, |
| 0:11.0 | where in 28 minutes you and I get to understand a big issue |
| 0:14.3 | with the help of the top experts on the subject. |
| 0:17.6 | This week, COVID infections in Britain have been soaring again. |
| 0:21.8 | How worried should we be this time around? |
| 0:25.1 | Has the nature of the virus changed? |
| 0:27.2 | And how much of a threat does it pose to the NHS? |
| 0:33.9 | Right now, according to the organisation of national statistics, 4% of the population have got COVID. |
| 0:41.7 | After two and a half years of the pandemic last month, your multi-jab presenter got it too. |
| 0:47.8 | I'm okay, thank you. |
| 0:49.3 | And I don't know what variant I had, but it's likely that it was one of the new Omicron sub-variants, about which |
| 0:55.0 | there's been a fair bit of concern. But how worried should we be this time? Has the virus really |
| 1:01.3 | mutated in an alarming way? And how much of a threat does coronavirus still pose to the NHS? |
| 1:08.1 | Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out. Let's start with the latest |
| 1:16.8 | stats. We asked James Gallagher, the BBC's Health and Science correspondent, to be our |
| 1:22.0 | talking COVID dashboard. If you picture what's happening with COVID in the United Kingdom as like a roller coaster, say the big one in Blackpool, you're not going to be too far off. |
| 1:33.2 | So we reached heights we'd never seen before around the end of March when 5 million people in the UK were estimated to be testing positive for COVID. |
| 1:42.3 | And then that plummeted sharply down to about 1 million by the end of May. |
| 1:46.8 | But since then, we've been swinging back up again quite steeply. |
| 1:50.5 | So around 2.7 million or 1 in 25 of us has the virus in our bodies now. |
... |
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