You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. Today I'm talking to John Lancaster and Rupert Beale, who both have pieces in the latest issue of the LRB on different aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

John Lancaster is a contributing editor at the paper, whose most recent book is The Collection

Reality and Other Stories. Rupert Beale is a clinician-scientist group leader at the Francis

Crick Institute. His latest piece is his seventh dispatch from the lab since the pandemic

began in March 2020. Thank you both very much for joining me. So we're recording this on the afternoon

of Monday the 13th of December. It's 10 days since your pieces went to press. In COVID time,

that's roughly four doublings of Omicron cases. In your piece, John, which is a kind of overview of the pandemic so far, you write that

we don't know where we are in the story.

Everyone has been hoping since it started that the end is in sight, that we're nearer

the end in the beginning.

But there's still no reason to think that's true, is there?

Hi, Tom.

Thanks for having me.

No, well, funny enough, because I've had those books

for a while now, it'll astonish your millions of listeners to know that the LRB doesn't always

review things like within seconds after publication. I know that's a scoop. So I've had it for a while and been trying to sort of

catch up with the narratives it kept changing and wrote the draft, which I sent in, I think

they've had it for a bit over a month and it's still, you know, it's still basically the same

piece which ended with, it ends on this warning note about what might yet happen.

And then sure enough, about a week after I filed it,

we started hearing reports from South Africa,

and since then the news has got steadily worse.

...