Dr Eric Foulkes
speaker
13 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2021
last heard Jan 2021
Dr Eric Foulkes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
My name is Dr Eric Foltz.
I work at Imperial College London in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology.
When we looked at whether this was present in our own database, we found that it wasn't only present, but it also occurred on this particular lineage.
which carried with it a whole bunch of other interesting mutations.
And that's really what triggered the initial alarm that this might be something unusual.
The next step was for an analyst, like me in this case, to dig through the data and see how quickly the virus was spreading and what parts of the UK it was spreading in.
It's a bit like comparing like a horse race, and you want to know which horse is likely to take the lead.
What we can do is look at the frequency that this new variant appears over time and how that changes.
And the rate, in this case that B.1.1.7 is increasing, tells us something about how much more transmissible it's likely to be in the population.
We've been tracking lineages for many months now, and that value of 70% was much bigger than anything we had seen before.
If we take this difference in growth to be basically like a multiplier times the reproduction number, that basically means someone with the old variant might infect one person, then someone with the new variant would infect 1.7 people on average.
Overall, I think we caught it quite early because when we wrote that first report, there were only about 900 genomes that had this variant.
And that might sound like a lot, but it was on a background of approximately 60,000 that had been collected over the autumn.
Showing 1–13 of 13