Coronavirus - new variants
BBC Inside Science
00:00
Vaccination
So few people are being tested generally in the UK, how do you acquire this population-scale data on which variants are circulating? The density of sampling has drastically been reduced as time has gone on. Now we are using mainly data from hospitalised patients where samples are taken and then sent for sequencing and data collected. So we're getting a small snapshot of what's going on in the community. It's very difficult to really make accurate predictions or estimations of the proportions of different variants circulating in the UK. We can only base this on the hospitalised cases that we're seeing.
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