Well of course the Kent variant has been the thing that's really
caused us to go into quite a severe lockdown over the Christmas period, so we have been living with
a variant that certainly is now becoming more common across Europe.
But there are also other variants, what are called variants of concern,
particularly the South African variant which
is increasing and also what's called the P1 variant. This is the variant that
was detected in Manaus in Brazil and if you remember a few weeks ago we had a
manhunt for the sixth person of six cases and now we're seeing actually we have
27 detected cases of the P1 variant, so that's increasing what's doubled in the last week.
so this is why I think the government wants to include that fourth test that variance test
so we are seeing variants and we obviously have to take those very seriously because
if we do come out of lockdown the last thing anybody wants is yet another lockdown.
Unfortunately not, I don't think it will I think one of the major problems is
this asymptomatic transmission, so it hides itself so well and often it's transmitted before you even
develop symptoms or you may not develop symptoms at all, so that's going to make it really really
hard, it does mutate, I think we will learn to live with it, like we live with seasonal flu, I think
we're going to have to continually vaccinate each year, just like we do the seasonal flu,
but I think I don't ever see us getting a 0 Covid situation, I really don't.
Until Covid happened the number of deaths from seasonal flu each year wasn't in the public
consciousness and there can be 20-30,000 deaths from flu in a bad year and that is just something
that people don't ever really think about. I know that when I present this in lectures people are like
'really?' and it tends to affect the people who are in the 70s and over and the hospital admissions
are really really high. Now there's not been much seasonal flu this year because of Covid, perhaps
also there's not been so much seasonal flu because of the social distancing and all the hygiene
aspects that we've taken and I think it's just going to become like that, I think unfortunately
it's going to be one of those illnesses that comes into the the group of respiratory illnesses that
unfortunately lead to death in vulnerable people over the winter period. Covid-19 will spread in the cold
and the heat equally. What Covid-19 won't do is it won't spread with strong ultraviolet light,
so sunshine, so it's very fragile when it comes to that kind of disinfectant, so when it's warm
outside and the sun is shining then the virus won't survive as long on surfaces or in the air
in the presence of ultraviolet light. In the dark in gloomy cool conditions it's going to survive
much longer but out in the sunshine it's going to denature and degrade very fast.
So getting the vaccine is not actually going to stop you from getting infected, it's unlikely to
stop you from getting infected, why the vaccine works is it stops you from shedding so much
virus. So once you've been infected with the virus and particularly with coronavirus what it does is
it targets your airway epithelial cells, so all the epithelial cells the particular cell type
that line your nose and your throat and all the way down into your lungs that's what
coronavirus will infect. So once the cell has been infected the virus can then divide and
pat we might multiply itself and then it buds off from infected cells and then you've got lots more
virus particles that are available to then infect other cells nearby. When you have been vaccinated
the vaccine will hopefully what it does is it primes your immune response to kill off any
virus infected cells and any particles and use antibodies to neutralise any particles of virus,
so if you've been vaccinated and then you get infected with the virus again
this time you're going to make a immune response much more quickly
and therefore it will neutralise the virus, so you won't shed so much virus, which means you won't
spread so much virus and in fact it can reduce your virus spread to very very very low levels.
So yes, definitely do have the vaccine even if you've had Covid before, it can still
prevent you from making and shedding more virus and infecting other people.
I think it will affect students, again it depends what they're graduating in. I
think there will be some jobs, and we already know that there are some jobs that have had to make
redundancies and cut backs because of the pandemic and so we can't shy away from that issue when
we're looking at that impact for our students who are going to be graduating.
Having said that we are also aware that there are other markets that have flourished
during the pandemic, largely because we're all remote and so online sales have gone up
and we know that and some new products have come onto the market to try and you know
address the pandemic and things like masks, etc. you know those sorts of services, wellbeing
services is a big area that's growing both in terms of jobs within companies, so looking after
the wellbeing of staff but also wellbeing services for the general public. So I think
yes, there will be an impact on graduation but at the same time I think students need to
kind of look outside the box and look at the new avenues where new jobs are being created and
will be created in the next year or so and there will be opportunities for them to do that.
We are starting to see increases in the case numbers in children and we've seen
in the past that cases start in younger people and then move up the age groups and of course if
there are cases in schools then it's possible that those school children will go
home and potentially infect their parents and the risk is as more and more things become unlocked
there's more potential for different groups to mix and for more transmission to happen.
So it's very possible there will be a further wave, but further wave in cases
and of course you know one good thing about Covid, if there is a good thing,
is that the severity amongst children is relatively low but what we don't want to see
is that going through to the vulnerable groups, so the older people potentially but also people
who may be vulnerable by having clinical conditions that haven't yet received the vaccine.
The accuracy of lateral flow tests or any test is really important to understand. If you get a
positive reading on a lateral flood test, you have the virus inside you, no doubt about it, you can be
very confident that you are carrying the virus, you have the virus inside you. If you get a negative
test that does not mean you don't have the virus, it means that the virus has not
been detected and there are several reasons why you could have the virus and still not
test positive, depending on how you took the sample when you stuck your stick inside your
head and scraped around, did you actually scrape the right piece of tissue that had virus in it,
or maybe you've only recently been infected and the disease hasn't developed yet so there
isn't enough virus for you to sample and test and finally maybe the chemicals or the tests
that you were using were faulty and you sampled everything was fine the virus was there
but the test didn't work properly. The lateral flow test fails to danger, so if you get a false
negative reading you are a very dangerous person if you behave as if you haven't got the virus. You
have to behave as if you may have the virus and small things that you do, like wear a mask, don't
get too close to people, maintain good biosecurity, could save someone's life, you'd never know,
but small actions have huge consequences of this disease.
So if you test negative doesn't mean you're safe, it means you should be careful, if you
test positive you have the virus you need to take precautions and follow the guidelines.
Based on what we've seen with other respiratory illnesses
we would suggest that you take it easy. Your immune system will be incredibly vulnerable it's taken
a huge huge hit and the Covid infection causes massive disturbances in your immune system, which
seem to persist even after you've stopped having your symptoms, so because of that using exercise
as a way to rehabilitate you need to take it slowly, be very very aware of your fatigue levels
and that's the way that we've seen it with with other respiratory illnesses and we think that
will be something similar but obviously Covid thrown up so many new things anyway, so it might
be something that takes a bit longer in Covid than it has done in something like seasonal flu.
One of the things about the pandemic is there's been a much greater focus on mental health
and motivationally speaking in terms of exercise that's a really good thing
because if you exercise to improve your mental health that's a really
strong attachment between the action the exercise and the goal to improve your mental health
and because when you exercise you will probably be very likely to feel better straight away
and so those good feelings and increased mental health get attached to the activity
and that becomes very powerful and actually motivationally speaking that's better
than exercising for physical health, because if you are exercising, for example to get
fitter down the line, you don't really get fitter and you don't improve your health too much
longer in the long term and so they're quite detached the exercise in the goal and so that's
motivationally not as powerful. So actually exercising for your mental
health, which we're all encouraged to do during the pandemic, is also a better bet
motivationally speaking to help you sustain those exercise routines and their ages. So if I
had to put a bet on one, mental health/ physical health I would advise putting your money
behind exercising for mental health, to help you sustain those exercise behaviours in the long run.
The first is to preserve your sleep habits
and importantly to preserve a getting up time each morning and not to spend too much time in bed,
that's the first thing. The second thing is unique to lockdown, one of the things that
lockdown has afforded is an opportunity to be quite flexible with our behaviours, if you're
not sleeping terribly well try to avoid napping during the day, even though it's easier now than
it's probably ever been for many of us okay, if you avoid napping during the day you
preserve sleepiness until bedtime and if you have a sleep problem sleepiness is a precious resource,
don't squander it napping during the day. And the third thing is if you're managing your workload
at home try and maintain boundaries between work related issues and home related issues,
stop working at a time when you can place a buffer between the end of your work period and
the beginning of your home life period, separate these two things and don't merge them in a way
that demands that you take work related thoughts, more so than you usually would to your bed.
The problem with Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy is that it's tied up with all kinds of really
big fears and anxieties that the public has gone through since the pandemic began. So one
of the important things that I've been working on, in relation to vaccine hesitancy, is how do we
provide people with the information that they need to endorse positively the vaccines
in their online social networks, to reach the news avoiders the people who say that
they don't really actively follow the news about Covid but of course they also say that they're
likely to go online and discourage others, what we suggest is that direct forms of contact are
actually more useful for government and public health messaging. So what would be a better bet
really for these people is to send direct mail, post in other words, letters or to
contact people by phone and we know for instance that and so-called anti-vaxxer, anti-vaccination
activists, are are highly organised online, particularly on social media, so we suggest
that one of the main aims to kind of counteract the influence of anti-vaxxer networks which are
entirely unfounded beliefs about about the safety and efficacy of vaccines of course, what we need
to do is to provide people with a reason for browsing away from their social media environments,
what we've got to realise is that it's just as important to give people who are positive about
vaccines good things to share. So it's important therefore to provide this information in social
media settings not only because some people who are doubtful about taking the vaccine might
hopefully click onto a government or a public health website, an NHS website,
but it's also important to empower those who are positive to share this material in their personal
networks online. So it's a rather complicated set of recommendations that add up to
solving this particular communication problem.
You know we have a prison system at the moment which has around about I think 76,000-77,000
people in it and before the pandemic we were looking at probably about 82,000-83,000 and now that
in itself is that the prison population is eased as a result of the backlog of cases going through
the courts, so less people are being processed through the court system and therefore ending
up in prison but we've also seen the benefits of having a slightly reduced prison population,
not just in terms of Covid specifically but we can think about it in terms of communicable diseases
across the board and the more we're able to spread people out, the more space we're able to provide,
that reduces those incidents of communicable diseases, whether it's Covid or flu
or whatever it might be and so there are definite benefits to having a smaller prison population
and that's going to be the case as well when rehabilitative efforts start returning to prisons
as well, the fewer people you have in a prison the easier it is to be able to engage those people in
a range of different rehabilitative activities and so I think that's probably the biggest thing
that we should look at there is what this reduced prison population has done, not just in terms of
preventing the spread of Covid but what it can do moving forwards and maybe we should
start thinking about putting less people in prison, who don't really need to be there.
I think the whole support thing does need to be looked at, I think it will be a very different
way of ensuring that employees are productive and healthy whilst they're working from home
and of course we know that in the workplace risk assessments are done to ensure that an
individual's working environment isn't going to be detrimental to health and that still needs
to be worked out by employees, to what extent they will be able to do that
for somebody who's working from home and what's the implication for equipment, for chairs, for desks,
etc. but also a lot of the the health and wellbeing initiatives that are
rolled out in workplaces will need a rethink as to how can this be delivered
remotely without losing the essence of what it is that they're trying to do.
you