We're wandering into the weird world of spiders! Plus in the news, as UK cases surge, should Covid precautions move to Plan B; how does raw sewage affect our waterways and is your mobile phone damaging your finger? Speaking in the Commons, the Shadow Health Secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, highlighted the pressures facing the health service as infection rates rise and said the vaccination program was stalling.
The doctors' union, the BMA, has accused ministers of being willfully negligent by not introducing some coronavirus restrictions in England. Some, like Bath University mathematician Kit Yates, think that as half term comes to an end, restrictions need to be reintroduced across the board sooner rather than later, as Chris Smith found out Kit - I'm worried that when schools do go back that we will see cases rising again and of course that will lead to rises and hospitalisations.
Unfortunately that will lead to rises in deaths. At the moment we're averaging a rate of death equivalent to about 50, a year, which I think is unacceptably high. Kit - What we could be doing is taking relatively light touch mitigations, things like asking people to wear masks in enclosed public spaces, things like putting mitigations in schools to try to make sure we can mitigate the spread in schools like ventilation and filtering.
I think there are small things we can be doing like asking people to work from home, which could all have a big impact on transmission. Cases are not growing that quickly at the moment as the reproduction number is just above one, which means it's growing quite slowly and small things we could do now would help us to bring cases down as we head into winter.
Paul - Well, at the moment, it's looking substantially more promising than even a week or so ago. Case numbers have started to decline but we are also beginning to see, I think, hospitalisations now starting to plateau. Paul - Absolutely. We're in a situation where the vast majority of adults and particularly vulnerable adults have already had one course of vaccine.
