Global News Podcast - Omicron versus the world: Your questions answered

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

As the Omicron variant spreads around the world and cases surge, BBC correspondents tell us how Covid-19 is impacting our lives, our businesses and our economies.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC podcasts. This is an extra coronavirus edition of the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard and in this podcast,

published on Tuesday 21st December, we'll be taking stock of where we are with the pandemic just now and asking what we should expect next. We can't promise you that everything will be all right, but we can promise you no drama, no fuss and no fear mongering. Just the facts as we know them right now, along with some educated reflection and prediction. It's slightly longer than usual. There's a lot to get in. so let's begin. It's been quite long. We're going for straight, but at the same time, I wouldn't mind another lockdown. I think it's better for the world right now. Puts a pause on the world. I feel like everybody's just been desensitised to it, to be honest, because it's been going

on for so long. Yeah, it's just a normal thing now, you know. We just have to live with it, you know. We need a bit of the truth about if these restrictions are working or not. My daughter had very complications from COVID. For us, the life is different now. It's a bit boring. I guess you just have to be patient and follow rules. I'm just living my life and I'm keeping myself safe.

I can't worry about the government always changing their mind. Getting on for two years into the pandemic and now battling a new variant, Omicron. How do you feel about it all? Tired? Fearful? Fed up? Or just taking it in your stride? Well, here's the message from the man in charge of steering us through this crisis, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. No region, no country, no community and no individual is safe until we are all safe. The emergence of the highly mutated Omicron variant underlines just how perilous and precarious our situation is. Indeed, Omicron demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics that will inevitably land on their shores. I've been speaking to our health and science

correspondent James Gallagher and our global health reporter Naomi Grimley. And I put it to Naomi that although the World Health Organization has set targets for vaccinations around the world, the picture is still pretty uneven. Just coming up to the end of the year, they do have this goal for 40% in each country being vaccinated. But actually, there's still 100 countries in the world which haven't met that target. And then when you look about across the world at continents, it's really noticeable. So in the case of Europe, you've got vaccination rates often of around 70%. Whereas if you look at Africa, it's more like 7%. So there's still a lot

more to do, I think, before we even get to the point of having an equitable situation. So, James, what do we actually know two years on about the virus that we didn't know a year ago or at the beginning? Not a lot, actually, because we managed to figure out a huge amount of things in the first year. Since then, lots of the big questions are still unanswered. Where did the virus come from is still a raging debate that we don't have a definitive answer to. But scientifically, we've got better at understanding how the virus is mutating, what it's kind of doing, and I know we're going to touch on that later,

but also coming up with new tools and tricks for defeating it, so things like antiviral drugs. So we've kind of got better at understanding it and finding new ways to deal with it, and it's mutating and we're getting better at following it. But in terms of our fundamental understanding, we're kind of where we were 12 months ago. And forgive me if this sounds like a slightly stupid question, but we've had various variants. We've had the Delta variant and now we've got Omicron. And some of the

symptoms of the illness sound a little bit different now. Is the illness that people are getting from the Omicron variant still COVID-19? It is still COVID-19. So COVID just stands for coronavirus disease, and it emerged in 2019. That's where the name comes from. And it's all still that disease. And remember that the reason why some of the symptoms might be subtly shifting is probably as much to do with us as the virus. So if you've been vaccinated, or you've caught COVID a couple of times before you end up with a quite mild infection, well, that's because your immune system is better at dealing with it rather than the COVID-ness has changed. What do we actually know about this new mutation, Omicron, and how serious is it? Because some of the symptoms do seem more mild, don't they?

With a new variant, Omicron, what we've got is something that we know scientifically spreads very quickly. So it spreads more quickly than any of the other variants and it would do that anyway. It also has a trick in its toolbox that allows it to escape some of the immunity you've already got. So you can still get infected even if you've had past cases of past infections with coronavirus, with different variants, or in some cases, if you've been vaccinated, if you only had one or two jabs, then you can still catch the Omicron variant. So we know it's doing that.

In terms of, is it milder? Well, we don't really know if this variant itself is milder. And this is where there's so much confusion all the time about this, because if you compare this variant with all the previous variants, just line them up and infect people that have never been infected before, who have never been vaccinated, we don't know if the virus itself is any milder. But it is spreading in a world now that has been exposed to coronavirus before. So we have built up protection against these kinds of viruses. Millions and millions of people have been vaccinated. So when it goes into those people, it is going to be milder because

you've already got some protection. Does that make sense? The virus itself might not be any safer, but we're just better at dealing with it. So James, vaccines. Are vaccines actually keeping up with the way that the virus itself is mutating? Well, Jackie, let's take a listen to Dame Sarah Gilbert, who was the designer of the University of Oxford slash AstraZeneca vaccine. As a virus spreads to more and more of our cells and those cells stop doing their normal jobs, we start to get symptoms. However, at the same time as the virus is infecting us, it is also being detected by our immune system, which has evolved to be able to detect intruders and then destroy them, in the process laying down a memory so it can respond quicker next time. Our immune systems are generally very good at this.

The reason viruses can nevertheless still make us ill is that they act so quickly. A viral infection can take hold before the immune system has had time to mobilise. This is where vaccines come in. Vaccines give your immune system the memory of what a virus looks like, but without you having to get sick with that virus in the first place. And vaccines all work on the same basic principle. They all present your immune system with some kind of harmless mimic of the virus. So what we know is that two doses of the vaccines aren't quite enough at preventing you from catching Omicron, because the vaccines were designed to attack and train your immune system to attack the original form of the virus. And it has mutated quite a lot since then. So you can still

get infected after two doses. A third booster dose, which kind of improves and matures your immune system. Well, that seems to be really important and can still prevent you catching it. But even if you've only had two doses, even if you've only had one dose, Jackie, I still think you're going to get a significant amount of protection against what really matters. And that's severe COVID that lands you in hospital and potentially kills you. Because if you're giving your immune system any head start, any training on how to tackle coronavirus, then that is going to be a massive, massive thing in terms of preventing the really severe outcomes that you can get from this infection. So in terms of infection, a little bit weaker, but in terms of severe disease,

we're still anticipating they're going to be incredibly important, incredibly powerful. Omicron was first identified in South Africa in November. Since then, it has spread to many other countries, all of which are still trying to work out just how serious the impact of the new variant is. But how much can they learn from South Africa, where the average age is 27 and less than 40% of the population is fully vaccinated? I've been speaking to our correspondent in Johannesburg, Nomsa Maseko. Well, at first, when South African scientists backed by the South African government announced the discovery of the Omicron variant, there was a lot of fear, a lot of concern,

confusion, because people wanted to know about the severity of the Omicron variant in comparison with the Delta variant, because it was a lot more deadly. There were many more people who died due to the Delta variant than there are, where Omicron is concerned. However, scientists here in South Africa have said that they believe now the worst is over. The Gaudeng province, which is the most populous province in the country, also the economic hub of the country, was the epicenter of the Omicron variant. They are saying that infections have now peaked and that the number of daily infections is expected to decrease. And we'll hear more from Nomsa later in this podcast with a look at the wider picture in Africa.

Coronavirus was first identified in the Chinese province of Wuhan in December 2019, and there is still controversy about where it came from. A World Health Organization team concluded earlier this year that it almost certainly began in bats and was transmitted to humans either directly or via an intermediary animal. But others still believe that the virus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, and the WHO is still officially investigating that possibility, despite repeated Chinese denials. In the meantime, China has continued its hardline response to COVID as we heard from our Asia-Pacific editor, Michael Bristow.

Whenever there's been an outbreak anywhere in China, they've responded swiftly with mass testing, mass lockdowns, restrictions on the movements of people. That's working in the sense that they've managed to keep a lid on COVID. The number of cases daily are very, very few. The economy is still trundling along quite well. People are able to move around if there were no COVID cases in that particular area. So they've been, to some extent, quite successful.

The difficulty for China, as every other country in the world has found, is how do you move out of that initial stage of zero COVID? There has been some rumblings in China of dissatisfaction because of the toll this strategy obviously takes on people who aren't able to do and go about their ordinary business when there's only one or two cases. But at the moment, China is staying. It's still going to take this approach. So that's China. What about elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region? Well, elsewhere in Asia, there were countries who were taking the same approach as China. I'm thinking specifically of Australia, New Zealand, Singapore. They had very low cases and they looked to have very strict lockdowns. But all of those

three countries have moved out of that strategy and moved into an area of kind of living with COVID and opened up their borders to a certain extent. Other countries in East Asia, obviously, there's great differences between each country. But generally speaking, they haven't been hit as hard as Europe and the Americas, partly because they came down quite strictly very quickly and have maintained a very vigilant stance. I'm thinking of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, those kind of places. That was Michael Bristow with a look at the situation in the Asia-Pacific region. Let's get a snapshot now of other parts of the world. I'm Mark Lowen in Italy, the first country in the West to be crushed by the pandemic in 2020. And now with the second Christmas under

Covid, it and much of the rest of Europe are tightening restrictions again amidst surging cases. Proof of vaccination is needed for pretty much all venues here and for employees in several professions. France too is considering the passes at work and has banned non-essential travel from Britain due to its rapid rise in Omicron, Germany doing the same. The Netherlands has become the first in Europe to re-enter full lockdown and Austria is the first to impose mandatory vaccinations from February. The picture on vaccines is mixed. While Portugal has more than 90% of people fully vaccinated, at the bottom of the list is Bulgaria, with only around 30% double-jabbed and lots of vaccine

disinformation. Now countries are racing to deliver boosters. But with restrictions returning across Europe, it feels like the ghost of Christmas past is lurking. I'm Nomia Iqbal in Washington, DC. This winter is starting to feel like a blast from the past when it comes to the pandemic. The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has been spreading. All but six states have cases. In some cities like New York, the numbers have doubled in 24 hours. And so the prospect of a holiday season surge means we're seeing a return to policies of last year. Things like indoor mask mandates, remote classes,

cancelled theatre shows have all made a comeback. But some leaders in different states are calculating their approaches because they know that so many people are fatigued by restrictions and may not stick to them. Americans simply do not want Christmas 2021 to be a replay of Christmas 2020. But the country's top infectious disease expert, Dr Fauci, said that people just need to get vaccinated. Many Americans still haven't got their jabs. He says get boosted, keep wearing your masks, avoid gatherings if you aren't sure what everyone's vaccination status is.

He says this new variant is extraordinary, but if people use the guidance they're familiar with to keep safe, then most people will be protected. I'm Will Grant in Mexico City to give you a picture of what the pandemic has looked like in Latin America. It has been a decidedly mixed picture with reliable statistics very hard to come by. Here in Mexico, for example, some analysts believe the true total of those who have died from COVID is almost double the official estimate. What we do know, of course, is that many parts of the region, particularly in South America, have been very badly hit. Certainly by the middle of this year, more than half a million Brazilians had died of Covid.

That's the second highest death toll worldwide after the United States. Certainly one thing that the entire region has in common is the economic impact, particularly for those economies which rely heavily on tourism in Central America and the Caribbean. Many have seen their economy shrink significantly over the past two years and have made very modest economic projections for 2022. When it comes to vaccines, many Latin American nations have taken a very pragmatic approach. They've obtained vaccines from whichever providers they can, meaning that when many citizens went to receive their vaccines, they didn't know whether or not it would come from China, Russia

or one of the big Western pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer or Moderna. Now, most Latin Americans are acutely aware that their current atmosphere of calm is only relative as they watch Europe and other parts of the world struggle to cope with the Omicron variant. Decision makers and populations alike are bracing themselves. The number of COVID-19 cases in Africa have exceeded 9 million and more than 220,000 related deaths have been reported. Countries reporting the most infections each day include South Africa, Zimbabwe, Eswatini, Kenya and Nigeria. South Africa, which has the most sophisticated

genomic sequencing facilities on the continent, was the first to announce the detection of the Omicron variant after four diplomats tested positive in Botswana. The travel bans which were imposed on 11 African countries have since been lifted. The focus now is to vaccinate key populations across the continent. Many countries appear to be struggling to reach their population immunity targets due to unavailability or slow uptake of

the COVID-19 vaccine. The African Center for Disease Control has said out of 55 African Union member states, only Morocco, South Africa, Seychelles, Libya and Mauritius were targeting the correct age groups with COVID-19 jabs. Only 3.3% of the population in Malawi has been vaccinated, while Eritrea is the only country yet to roll out COVID-19 vaccines. I am Anbaras Nettirajan from Colombo, Sri Lanka. South Asian countries have been closely watching the coronavirus situation around the world. They are worried about the new Omicron variant, the way in which it is spreading very fast in countries like the United Kingdom. And countries like India have placed a number of restrictions,

those coming from what they describe as at-risk countries, for example, countries from Southern Africa and the UK. And the travelers from these countries have been asked to undergo self-isolation for a week and after which, if they are negative following a PCR test, then they can go out of the residence. And the government is also urging its residents to take the second dose of the vaccine as early as possible. And in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, officials say the number of those affected by the Omicron variant is very minimal, but they are keenly watching. And for example, in Colombo, where I am now, the Sri Lankan authorities have been urging all those who are categorized as vulnerable to take a booster dose so that

they can safeguard themselves from the Omicron variant. Still to come in this special coronavirus edition of the Global News Podcast. Despite the call for cooperation, particularly, for example, over the sharing of vaccines, COVID-19 has shown that when a crisis hits, it's the nation state that still rules. We'll be looking at the impact of the pandemic on the way we're governed. Now, ever since the start of the pandemic, there has been disinformation online. It began with a flurry of messages alleging that the army and tanks were going to take to the streets and then evolved into more extreme and potentially dangerous conspiracy theories, such as the notion that 5G technology was linked to the pandemic or that face masks can make you ill. More recently, much of the conspiracy movement has focused more on vaccines,

alleging that they're part of a sinister global plot to microchip or deliberately harm us, or even to make us infertile or change our DNA. I asked our specialist disinformation reporter Marianna Spring what we know about who's starting these campaigns. It's a combination of different people who make it up and push it. What you often find with a lot of these conspiracies is that they seize on something that's true. There's a kernel of truth at the start, and then they very quickly spiral into a false and harmful narrative. It's often useful to actually think about the tactics rather than where specific claims originate from. And if you can understand that there are a group of people who have decided to oppose vaccines no matter what, regardless of the scientific evidence

that is put to them, that pushes out any ability to have nuanced and important conversations about side effects or effectiveness or anything else. And what they will do is they will take one thing that's happening. Recently, for example, we've seen how there are various football players who have experienced cardiac problems or who've been ill. That's been seized upon by anti-vaccine activists who claim, this is all the vaccine. Look at all these scary images of when someone's become poorly while they're playing football, a player, in fact, that you might admire and like, and look what the vaccine's done to them,

when actually the picture is so much more complicated than that. A lot of players have had COVID. That has an impact on their hearts. There are a number of cardiologists that have spoken out about the varied reasons that players have been ill, but that doesn't matter to these anti-vaccine activists. And there will no doubt be something in a month and two months and three months that they will seize upon again. So the people who are doing this are doing it because it allows them to grow influence, because it allows them to grow their following, because it can in some cases allow them

to make money. But there's a kind of ring of people beyond that who have been very much sucked into these conspiracy movements who genuinely believe this stuff and push it because they do that. And then there are other bad actors, whether that's political figures, whether that's people, you know, influence operations that we've seen all around the world that can co-opt and exploit these conspiracy movements. They're very hard to untangle. And to be very clear, when we talk about disinformation, we are definitely not just talking about the right to question government policy or the efficacy of government policy trying to contain the pandemic, aren't we? No, not at all. That is a very legitimate concern

that people all over the world have, the way that their governments have chosen to handle the pandemic, behaviours of their governments, criticism that their governments have come under and have been subject to. But what we find, again, is that on social media, those kinds of criticisms and in many ways that distrust that people have in the politicians leading them is exploited and is used to push harmful narratives. And I remember actually interviewing a woman who used to be an anti-vax activist and who no longer is. And one of the things she said to me was that she didn't trust politicians or the system, which had in many ways let her down, a very legitimate position to take. But it meant that she turned to other people who were going to exploit her and let her down. And when she realized that, that she was actually being conned by someone else, it allowed her to escape this

conspiracy world and to trust the facts and evidence that people who really know what they're talking about when it comes to vaccines, pandemics, science, were saying. That was Marianna Spring. Well, as we know, the pandemic has had a huge and devastating impact on the world economy. 3% was wiped off economic output in 2020. And while that might not sound like much, it's actually a staggering $3 trillion. In 2021, things started to recover, but there were big differences between richer countries that got their vaccine programmes rolling and poorer nations that haven't done so well with their vaccines and are still suffering significant economic problems as a result. Generally, though, there are likely to be lasting effects on the way we do business and run our economies.

As we heard from our business correspondent, Theo Leggett. Certainly when it comes to supply chains, getting goods from one part of the world to the other in time to be fitted into, say, the car that's being built or in time to get a shipment of food or whatever. Those supply chains have been shown to be extremely vulnerable and they're still not settled down yet. So businesses looking forward might be thinking we've got to build in a bit of flexibility. You know, many businesses these days are built on just-in-time principles. So something arrives at a factory when it's needed. It isn't held in a warehouse for any period before it's fitted on your car or on your machine or whatever. And that's caused a lot of problems.

So there may be businesses who decide they need to put a bit of extra slack into the system. There's also likely to be lasting changes in the way we work. For example, I'm talking to you from my front room at home. Now, two years ago, I would have thought that was ridiculous. I'd have been in an office and ready to run into a studio at the drop of a hat. I don't do that anymore, and communication technology allows me to work from home. And for office workers around the world, that is a big thing.

And that is going to change the way office workers at least function going forward. A bit different if you work in a factory, obviously. We don't know quite where they're going to come in or what impact they're going to have, but there are certainly going to be changes. Has the way that people have worked affected women's employment? Very much so, in fact. There was a recent report by McKinsey, the consultants, which showed that a much higher proportion of women were either thinking of leaving the workplace or reducing the number of hours they worked as a result of the pandemic. And it's disproportionately impacted poorer women as well, because they're the ones who've been more likely to work in service

industries. So, you know, you're talking people who work in restaurants or hairdressers or whatever, and they've been unable to work during the lockdowns, which has been a problem for them. But also they've been more restricted in how they can work subsequently because things like childcare have become much harder to get. So during the lockdown periods, yes, as you said, women bore much more of the extra responsibilities for looking after children,

particularly when those children were not able to go to school or go to daycare centres or whatever. And they've struggled to get back into working afterwards because there are still problems and they have those extra domestic duties. So, you know, that's a big question for policymakers going forward. How do you encourage these women back into the workforce? So we've heard a lot about the economic and physical effects of the pandemic on health and people's freedoms and livelihoods. But what about our mental well-being?

Claudia Hammond is the presenter of Health Check on the BBC World Service. What is interesting in a way is how resilient we are. You know, life completely changes. It's very different. We're stopped from doing a lot of the things that help us cope with life. Seeing other people, which is how people get through in times like war, is by talking together about it. That's what we've often been stopped from doing in person anyway. But amazingly, most people are resilient about it. I mean, there was a study during lockdown in Israel and one in Wuhan where 73% of people in Israel showed complete resilience, 84% in Wuhan. So most people cope, but an enormous amount of people don't. It is estimated that there are an extra 53 million

cases of depression in the world as a result of the pandemic, and an extra 76 million cases of anxiety. And so that is clinical anxiety, not just feeling a bit worried. And some people are much more affected than others. It has been worse for younger people. It's been worse for women in general. It's been worse for people who live alone and people with low incomes. Then there's this slightly weird thing where for a few, things have improved. Some people find life easier during lockdowns. And I've been speaking to some people with very serious mental health problems that they had before, who've actually found it, some of them slightly easier when other people suddenly didn't expect them to go out anymore and weren't trying to get them to do things. And of course, people who hated their jobs and going into work, if they were able to

work from home, they've escaped straight away from the place that's difficult. So there is this minority for whom it's better. Most people cope. And then there's another minority for whom things have been a lot worse. That was Claudia Hammond. Well, the World Health Organization has urged world leaders to act together to find a global solution to a global problem. But as our political correspondent Rob Watson reports, even seasoned leaders find themselves in unfamiliar territory. Covid-19 has undoubtedly presented both the most global and the most profound challenge since the end of the Second World War. Almost universally, politicians have struggled in the face of the pandemic, as have the various political models they represent. Rather strikingly, neither the political system involved, democracy versus authoritarian, nor even national income, rich versus poor, have been good predictors of how a country

has fared in dealing with COVID-19. Also striking is how this most global of crises has produced the least global of responses. Despite the call of multinational organisations such as the UN and the WHO for cooperation, particularly, for example, over the sharing of vaccines, COVID-19 has shown that when a crisis hits, it's the nation state that still rules. In other words, political leaders the world over have prioritised protecting their own populations and economies over working with others. Not, of course, that doing even that has been easy. Everywhere leaders have struggled, as they have throughout human history, with what's known among policy advisers as the precautionary principle, namely how to make decisions to prevent harm when the scientific

evidence is uncertain or incomplete. Throughout 2022, those twin challenges look set to remain. Politicians will still struggle to cooperate beyond national borders and will still have to make policy without all the data they'd like. Is there anything at all these leaders can learn from the pandemic so far? Perhaps that in countries where trust in government is high, and where the political system is flexible and open to innovation, the outcome is better. But even so, no leader, no system has yet produced the silver bullet. Maybe, of course, there just isn't one.

That was Rob Watson. So is coronavirus just something we're going to have to live with? Back to our health and science correspondent, James Gallagher. Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, there's shades of grey within what that actually means. But in terms of are we going to see the end of COVID, that we're going to be able to put, you know, the genie back in the bottle? No, I mean, it is out there. It's spread far too wide. We knew this 12 months ago, to be perfectly honest.

It's too everywhere for it to ever end unless we manage to do a smallpox. But we've only managed to do a smallpox once where we vaccinated so many people that, you know, you just didn't give the virus anywhere to go. And that was the end of it. If that happens, it will be decades and decades and decades in the future. What we still don't really understand is how it's going to settle down. Is it going to settle down into something that's just, you know, it's completely irrelevant as the common cold? Or will it settle down into something that's more like a seasonal flu

where, you know, it still puts pressure on hospitals every year, still kills a lot of old and vulnerable people every year? Where it settles down to when we live with it, we don't exactly know yet. But each new wave of COVID, each new variant that we come across is kind of getting a bit milder because our immune systems are building up. We're more experienced with dealing with it. And so that's the general trajectory of where we're heading. Milder and milder and milder, but we don't know where that ends. And we've talked a lot about vaccines. Are we still anticipating having to get a booster

every year? Some people say that, yes, you're going to need a booster every year. I think it might end up being more nuanced than that. So, you know, with flu, we vaccinate vulnerable people every year. And at the moment, we're vaccinating against COVID. Absolutely everybody, you know, countries like China went down to like two and three year olds really, really quickly in terms of who they wanted to get vaccinated. So I don't think we're going to end up in a place where we think that everybody needs to be boosted every year. But I think boosters are going to be a fixture of some people's lives for a long time to come. And just finally, James, we've talked a lot about vaccines, of course. What about other treatments for people who have become ill? There's been some really, really cool stuff, actually, because there's the whole field of

antiviral drugs. And what they do is they, rather than training your immune system, they just go after the virus itself. They find ways of tapping into the virus's fundamental biology in order to limit its ability to replicate, make copies of itself inside our bodies. And those have been shown that if you give them really early on in somebody's infection, they can dramatically reduce the risk of you needing hospital treatment. And the reason that is, it keeps the amount of virus lower in your body, gives your immune system time to build up and learn how to attack it. And that basically is buying you time again. So you've got these antiviral pills, they're really potent. You've also got slightly harder to use, particularly in poorer countries, are these

infusions of antibodies. So these are the ones that have been designed in the laboratory. They're the ones that stick really tightly to the coronavirus. And again, they're a way of giving your immune system a head start because they stick to the virus, so the virus can't infect yourselves and that helps suppress it inside your body until your immune system catches up. So yeah, we've got far more tricks and tools in the box this year than we had last year, Jackie. So we've heard a lot, good and bad, about the progress of the pandemic and responses to it,

but coronavirus is still very much with us. And there's little to suggest that will change any time soon. So how are people feeling about the future? Let's hear again from some of those people we spoke to in our completely unscientific survey in central London. You will recognise some of the voices from the top of the podcast and we'll let them have the last word too. I think it's going to go on for longer than we think it is at the moment.

It will always be here. I think there'll be a new vaccine soon that will make us immune to it. The future for the people that lost their loved ones with this pandemic will be always different. It's going to move online, maybe let's say transportation, now everybody's going to have to put masks from now on. We will be back, we will definitely be back but it's all about like everyone, not the single one. I think we're going to be hyper vigilant and aware of germs and things like that. The part of our life now, it's been two years.

I believe that things will change for the better. Yeah, it will go back before COVID. Yeah, I'll be very happy. And that's it from us for now. The Global News Podcast will return later with its regular mix of world news. If you would like to comment on this podcast, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on Twitter at Global News Pod. Today's producer was Paul Day. The sound was mixed by Antonio Fernandez and David Evans. Our editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard. Until next time. Goodbye. News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts.