Why The UK is Already Headed for a Deadly Coronavirus Second Wave (Prof. Karl Friston)

Finally, we speak to Professor Karl Friston of the Independent SAGE Committee. He discusses whether it's the right decision to ease the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, the possibility of a second wave, the changes to the 2-metre rule, meat factories being the epicenter for new spikes in COVID cases, the accuracy of Coronavirus modelling, why the Nightingale Hospital proved to be less useful than previously thought and more!

STATEMENT FROM SIR PATRICK VALLANCE:

“…, two metres is safer than one metre, if it’s all unmitigated. But if you add the mitigations, and this is all in the papers that we’ve published, so if you start looking at things like orientation, are you side-by-side or back-to-back? Is ventilation good? Are face coverings being worn? Are other screens in place? Number of people in an enclosed environment is an important thing, you don't want to pack lots of people in, irrespective of whether they’re one metre or two metres apart. The time in which people spend in certain environments, and the environment itself, as we’ve just discussed in terms of the characteristics of that environment. Those are all features which are important, and what we've said in the work that’s been done by the environmental modelling group, is that one metre can be, with mitigations in place, can be equivalent risk to two metres, and that’s the basis for how you can make decisions and those are then policy decisions on the back of that. In terms of SAGE, SAGE is clearly not a, a, a decision making body, it’s an advisory body, the advice goes to all four nations and is used in all four nations and is consistent across all four.”