Kate Lamble
speaker
202 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2021
last heard 27 May
Kate Lamble’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's the first time he's spoken on air.
You know, Tim, it turns out that the UK is actually pretty good at regularly collecting samples of the virus across the country for full RNA sequencing.
Viruses naturally evolve and mutate as they move through a population.
And so virologists keep an eye on changes to the genetic code of the virus, which could change how it behaves.
Mutations which could allow it to infect cells more easily, for example.
Now, when people are tested for COVID, around 10% of samples that have proven positive for the virus undergo RNA sequencing.
That's thousands of samples every day.
This data is made available to scientists, allowing Dr. Voltz to track the different genetic variants of
also known as lineages, of the virus.
In December, Dr. Valtz was made aware of a particular mutation that was causing concern to scientists abroad.
Then, doing some mathematical modelling, he and colleagues were able to work out how this variant, named B.1.1.7, was spreading.
And what they found was that the new variant is 70% more transmissible than the variants present in the UK already.
Well, this is how Eric explains it.
So if you had R of 1 with the old variant, with 10 cases now leading to 10 new cases in the future, now you'd have R of 1.7.
with 10 cases leading to 17 new cases.
Now, we know that to have an R of only one, you need restrictions and social distancing.
So if we weren't taking any precautions at all and had no immunity, R might rise from about three to about five.
They are, and this isn't just mathematical modelling anymore.
Eric says they saw a clear correlation in areas where COVID cases were rising sharply, cases of the new variant were also up.
This all happened very quickly.
Showing 161–180 of 202 · page 9 of 11
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