Herd immunity is a very sound epidemilogical and and vacine related piece of terminology, isn't it? But r can tell us something about that. Because i itcan tell us roughly what proportion of the population we need to get immune in order for the thing to stop spreading. And at the moment we're just, this country's hovering along in a sort of fairly level and but high level of infections because there's so much immunity in the population.
With data on the Covid-19 pandemic changing shape with every new outbreak and new mutation, it's a complex task to make sense of where the story of the virus will head next. David Spiegelhalter is chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and an expert on crunching figures in order to understand successes and failures. His new book Covid by Numbers, co-written with Anthony Masters, seeks to shine a spotlight on the UK's handling of the pandemic. In this episode he speaks with the virologist and host of The Naked Scientist podcast Dr Chris Smith.
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