James Hadfield

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60 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2020 last heard Mar 2020

James Hadfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Health Report · Travel bans, coronavirus and intensive care, and tracking the virus · 16 Mar 2020 podcast

Now actually having 500 genomes is brilliant and and a credit to everybody involved, but it is a very small fraction of the total number of cases out there.

So we can make some inferences with a reasonable amount of confidence.

But for big questions such as how did it get to Italy, we're missing some crucial links.

It probably got there from China, but it's very hard to say absolutely conclusively.

at the moment.

What we can say is that that introduction into Italy looks like there was one main introduction which has been growing in Italy, spreading throughout the community and in the north of Italy, and that has seeded transmissions into plenty of other countries throughout Europe and throughout the world.

We have dates that are sort of around about the middle of January, but it's very important to know that there are wide confidence intervals on this.

So all of these data that we we run into the models are all probabilistic models.

And it's very hard to say for sure that it happened on this day or even this week.

So we believe that it was sometime in January.

The safest prediction is that it will continue to mutate.

But there's no guarantee at all.

In fact, the the odds are that there won't be any mutations that make it more virulent, like people try to say.

If anything, there could be mutations that attenuate it very slightly.

So genetically, we predict that we're going to continue to see mutations, we're going to continue to see spread around the world, and we're going to continue to be able to track that spread through the mutation.

But as to any change in the biology of the virus, that is is pure speculation, I think, at this point.

In general, speaking in very general terms, there's been a history of viruses that if they stay in the human population over time.

is a little bit of that and it's also that there can be selective pressures to favour viruses that are actually not as deadly for their host.

Along those lines, yes.

But I think we can't hope for that to happen in this case.

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