This is the Guardian. Chances are you know someone who's currently wondering if that sore throat, cough or runny nose might be something other than a cold. Yes, it's the sea word, COVID-19. It has reared its head again.

And with another new variant emerging and worries about the waning immunity in the population, the government has brought forward the winter vaccination program and says testing and surveillance will be scaled up in England.

So do we actually need to worry about this new variant?

And over three years on from the initial outbreak, how

prepared are we to face another winter of infections? From the guardian, I'm Madeline Finley and this is Science Weekly.

So with me today to discuss all things COVID is Ian Sampor, science editor and of course my fellow science

weekly host. Hello Ian.

Hi Maddie. So Ian, where do we currently stand in terms of COVID cases?

What kind of rates in the population are we seeing at the moment?

Well, they've been pretty low.

We saw a slight pickup around July this year. That seems to have

leveled off a little bit, but you have to sort of bear in mind that a lot of the testing that was

there, you know, this time last year and the year before just is not being done anymore

but largely based on sort of hospital testing there are about just under maybe 4,000 cases a day in England and the

deaths are running about one or two a day. And the government has announced that

they are planning to scale up testing and

surveillance although we haven't yet got any details on what that's going to

look like but where do we stand at the moment? So if you think back to the height of the pandemic,

we were doing an awful lot of surveillance.

People were getting their LFTs out, testing themselves and sending those results into the government.

We had the Office of National Statistics doing their national infection survey which was

Absolutely one of the sort of gold standard surveys that was going on throughout the height of the pandemic.

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