In the Lab

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rupert Beale talks again to Thomas Jones about his work at the Francis Crick Institute, where he’s helping to set up a testing lab for Covid-19. He talks about the challenges of creating a scalable process, explains why a successful antibody test could be hard to achieve, and finds some reasons to be hopeful. You can find a full transcript of this episode HERE. Read more in the LRB: Rupert Beale: Wash Your Hands Lana Spawls: How to set up an ICU Thomas Jones: Quaresima Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the LRB podcast. If you subscribe to the LRB, you can get the first 12 issues for just £12. To find out more, go to lrb.me forward slash listen. That's LRB.m.m. forward slash listen.
0:17.1	Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. It's Monday the 6th of April.
0:23.7	At the weekend, I spoke with Rupert Beale, a clinician scientist group leader at the Francis Crick
0:28.2	Institute and LRourb contributor, who wrote about COVID-19 in the paper a month ago. We talked about
0:33.9	testing for the virus, about the work he's doing on that at the Crick,
0:42.8	also about antibody testing, drug therapies and vaccines, but mostly about testing for the virus itself.
0:46.7	Hello, Rupert, and thank you very much for joining us again.
0:49.4	It's the afternoon of Saturday, the 4th of April.
0:54.0	That's just over three weeks since we last spoke, and a month since you wrote your piece in the LRB.
0:57.2	Michael Gove has just given today's government briefing.
1:04.3	So some numbers then, first of all, they say that 183,190 people have been tested.
1:07.9	41,903 have tested positive.
1:13.0	Just over 15,000 people have been admitted to hospital with COVID-19 symptoms.
1:18.6	708 is the most recent daily death total, the highest so far.
1:22.8	And there have been 4,313 total deaths. And all those numbers seem are only going to rise.
1:27.3	And do they give an accurate picture of the crisis?
1:31.1	They do.
1:33.2	There is one sort of set of numbers which, in a way, is the most heartening.
1:38.8	And it matches with what colleagues are telling me on the front line,
1:42.8	which is that the number of admissions to hospital in London,
1:47.4	where, of course, the epicenter of the pandemic in the UK is,
1:53.9	the numbers of emissions are actually plateauing at the moment.
	...

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