president trump will make an outdoor speech from the white house on saturday — as he seeks to dispel lingering doubts about his recovery from coronavirus. several hundred supporters have been invited to hear him speak from a balcony. he's also planning to attend a rally in florida on monday. the us commission on presidential debates has announced that next week's second presidential debate has been cancelled. the commission had proposed a virtual debate between the two candidates — but that idea had been dismissed by president trump. the fate of the third presidential debate still remains unclear. on america's gulf coast — evacuations are under way in the state of louisiana —as yet another hurricane hits the shoreline. delta is a category two storm — with winds blowing at more than 100 miles per hour. it's on track to hit the city of lake charles. now on bbc news,

join zeinab badawi, her panel of experts and audience questioners from around the world to discuss covid—19 — should we learn to live with it? hello, and welcome to this edition of global questions with me, zeinab badawi. "don't be afraid of covid—19. don't let it dominate your life." that is what president trump has been telling americans. does he have a point? well, now thousands of scientists have signed a petition saying we should learn to live with the virus. and they are urging governments to protect the vulnerable and let everybody else get on with their normal activities. this is global questions: covid: should we learn to live with it?

well, to bring you this edition of global questions, our two panellists and our audience members pose their questions via video link. let me tell you who is in the hot seat giving the answers this week. we have professor sunetra gupta from oxford university in england. she is one of the three public health scientists who wrote a declaration calling on governments to provide focused protection for the vulnerable and to allow the rest of the population to resume normal life. the petition has been signed by thousands of experts. and dr soumya swaminathan is chief scientist for the who, the world health organization. she has 30 years experience in clinical care and her research work into hiv and tuberculosis has gained worldwide recognition. dr swaminathan believes testing and temporary lockdowns are essential to controlling the virus. welcome to you all and i will

put this down and give you all a solitary round of applause. remember, you too can join the conversation. let's get down to our first question straightaway. it is yusef from the maldives. yusef, what do you want to ask our two panelist? thank you, zeinab. my question is what would happen if we ended lockdown and stop the major restrictions? what would the challenges be like? professor gupta. thank you very much for that question. i guess what we have just called for is exactly that, that, to end lockdowns and stop major restrictions. but with a subtle difference. which is that we need to carry on protecting the vulnerable. this is not because we believe that as soon as you end lockdown and stop major restrictions that there would necessarily be an explosion in cases

of infection, in fact that is not what happened over the summer in many countries. sweden, for example, has never had lockdowns or major restrictions and infections are now under control, the epidemic has reached a state of control. so what we think would really work well is if we, the reason why we say this is because lockdown is a really is a really very destructive, as you know, as are some of the major restrictions. so the problem we're faced with of course the cost of the epidemic itself, which is the deaths that arise from it. so we think that we can have a win—win situation is by protecting those who we know are at high risk

of death, the elderly and frail, and some people with particular cohabilities, and if we protect them, we need to do that very carefully and very thoughtfully, then we can let the rest of the population, particularly you young people, go out there, and do what you need to do to live richful lives and stop the destructive effects of lockdown. dr swaminathan, is that how you see it at the who? the issue is that you cannot let your guard down. because the moment the virus finds people who are susceptible, and we know also that only 10% of the population or less have been exposed to this virus, so 90%, the majority of us are still vulnerable and susceptible. and the virus is going to strike. we know it is highly transmissible, particularly in certain settings. so what we are encouraging countries to do is to follow, and many countries have done it successfully, we have examples, particularly in the southeast asian region, where countries are putting measures in without locking down their economies, and still keeping the virus under control.

we also recognise different countries are in different stages and so it is a question about using the right approach based on the local data. all right, but you said we can't afford to let our guard down. so are you still supporting lockdowns, be they regional or nationwide, and still advocating major restrictions? just in a nutshell, could you pin your colours to the mast? the who never really recommended for lockdown. it was a reaction by countries at the very early stage of the pandemic. what we recommend are the known public health and social measures. so the testing and the isolating of infected people and we can do that much better now with diagnostics, and the tracing of clusters and identifying those situations. so i think we don't recommend lockdown, what would we recommend is taking action on those situations in encouraging the virus

to spread, so the three c's for example, close settings, crowded environment, and close contact, those need to be avoided by everybody, young and old, you cannot protectjust the elderly and the vulnerable in a society where everybody is living together. then you will have a big human cost because ultimately infections will spread from the young to the older and you can't keep them away from their parents or the grandparents, many countries are joint families, so it is not a very practical suggestion to say that the elderly should be cocooned and everybody else to live a normal life. very quickly, let me come back to dr gupta. your plan wouldn't work. it would work. first because it is temporary and the amount of time for which these restrictions would have to be applied is temporary. what we are suggesting, if you think about it, is a subset of lockdown. it is just focused on a vulnerable category. so yes, it would work, it will be temporary, and it would achieve an equilibrium with the virus that we cannot achieve

by repeatedly going into lockdown. let me ask what yusef thinks. yes. iagree. but i think at a certain point we have to come out and try out and try to live with the pandemic, we cannot... this something very difficult to sustain, to be under lockdown. thank you. let's go to west jaffa and indonesia to riddo. what do you want to ask our panel? thank you very much. so young people may be less vulnerable to the virus, but they are more vulnerable to the long—term effects of it. for example, education, mental health, jobs and environments — how do we protect them? thank you very much. dr swaminathan. that is a very good question. because as our participant just said, while young people are likely to have less health impacts from this infection, i want to qualify that by saying young people are not completely resistant or immune.

they do get sick and some young people do die, particularly when there were other risk factors. we know in a lot of countries smoking is a risk factor, obesity is a risk factor, so we have to remember that while the proportion of the young get very ill ill or die is less, it is not negligible. but the other effects of the pandemic on the young people is what hasjust been highlighted, impacts on education, we know 1.6 million children have been out of school and particularly it has affected people living in poverty. and this is where i think we need to come together. there needs to be solidarity within countries, within communities. and across countries. we have been talking about the mental health impacts of this. for health workers, for the young, for the old. we need systems to be able to support each other. so i think for young people it is particularly a difficult time because of the uncertainties about their own future and what is going to happen about education, going to college,

getting a job. professor gupta, we've heard of young people being referred to as the lost generation as a result of covid—i9. how would you answer that question? i think it is absolutely disgraceful what has been done to young people. young people have been asked to pay the price for us not being able to protect the vulnerable. it is true, we haven't been able to protect the vulnerable, mainly the elderly, and of course some people who have other conditions but we should have had national health systems in place that could do that without obliging young people to give up all these things and put them, like education, their training, their abilities to keep jobs, to grow socially, spiritually, we have denied young people these things. we feel passionately about this and that is why about this and that is why we've

suggested this alternative, which is actually the only way to get out of the situation, lockdowns only delay the spread of the virus. in order to reach an accommodation of the virus, we need to build up what we call herd immunity. and the only way we can do that is for the virus to spread in the population. we cannot wait until we have a vaccine. we need for this to happen and we need for young people to resume their lives. we can do that by protecting the vulnerable. that is a concrete solution. to say we will come out of it somehow is not a solution. we heard dr swaminathan say young people basically don't live in an island all by themselves. they interact with their grandparents and all the rest of it. so if you allow them all those freedoms, they will go around infecting everybody else. well, that is the whole point. within the period where they could do their grandparents a favour by becoming infected actually and acquiring immunity, they would need

to restrict those interactions. but that is not something we are a stranger to. that is what we have been doing through lockdowns. so yes, during the period, which is short, three to six months, it would be, it would have to be the case that grandparents are somehow isolated from the people who might affect them. who might infect them. over the age of 35, the mortality rate for covid—19 starts to climb significantly. so we have to keep in mind that there will be a proportion of young people who will also get very sick and who may die. professor gupta. the risk to anyone under the age of 65 is not significant. in comparison to the risks that we take on board every day from a host of other infectious diseases, not to mention things like driving a car. and i am 55 years old.

i would happily take any risk that is necessary to teach my students as a university teacher. thank you. let us now go to california to a phd student there, helena. i had a two—part question. as we learn about immunity and vaccination strategies, do we think at this point that the virus has settled fully into our communities? and if that is the case, how do we apply lessons from other novel diseases like hiv and zika to adapt to living with covid—19? a bit of a compound question there. i think basically what you are asking is that, is there evidence that covid—i9 is kind of settling down down in our communities? professor gupta, is their evidence? yes, there is. in many settings, we have seen it peak and come down,

many african countries in particular, we see that in many states of the us and parts of the world where we have not entered into this business of locking things down. we can see the natural process unfold. we have to, and it is absolutely right that we have to take lessons from other diseases, not hiv because it is very different, but zika is a similar form of infectious disease process. and also very fortunately, we know quite a lot about other coronaviruses. there are four seasonal coronaviruses circulating at the moment. we can...i think it is a reasonable expectation that this virus can and will and maybe already has to that level of endomicity. dr swaminathan. so it is true that the virus has spread globally and is present in most

countries but there are a handful of countries that managed to contain it very early on and have brought it down to an extremely low level if at all. china is a good example where there are occasional clusters which they're able to handle and contain very quickly. now what happens if there is another wave or not depends on what we do and what actions we take, what countries do over the next several months in the availability of a vaccine. so it is possible that with the natural course of infection and the measures the countries are taking, with a good vaccine, that we will be able to contain this infection to a large degree, and perhaps, we have done it in the past with the sars—cov—i

and this one is a little bit different in the properties but it is possible to contain, on the other hand it is possible also that it just gets established in human beings as yet another viral infection. we live with a lot of viral infections. but that it doesn't cause the kind of illness and death that we are seeing today because we are able to build that level of population immunity to widespread vaccination. just leaving vaccines aside, we are already better, aren't we, now at treating covid—i9 then we were when the pandemic first started? is that right? yes, absolutely. so we have now much more knowledge about how to treat people. you can see case fatality rates in most countries have come down progressively over the last few months. we also have much better diagnostics and we are able to detect people at a much earlier stage and not wait until they are really ill and showing up in hospital. so all of those things are helping to keep mortality rates much lower than they were but we have to remember we are still losing over 5000 people every day. of course. and the global mortality rate

so far is i million, more than i million in fact, and that is a huge number of course. and cases worldwide are over 35 million. let's now go to epsom in england, here in the uk, to evonne mckay. your question. what i would like to know is whether there is any long—term strategy for living with covid—19 in the event that an effective vaccine is not identified. let's come to you on that, dr swaminathan. what happens if the silver bullet or effective vaccine is not discovered? i would like to start by saying that i think i would be very optimistic at this stage that we would have several vaccines, because we have so many in the pipeline, many of them are quite promising with early studies, and so i would think that we will have vaccines. but i think it is a good question because it will be a period of time, and we will have to do all of these other things that we are talking about.

we have to prioritise i think in our own society what we want, i see the young people here prioritising education and i think all of us should prioritise education, but then we may have to deprioritise going to restaurants and pubs and socialising, so we have to have some trade—offs in society. professor gupta, if there is no vaccine, there will have to be some trade—offs in what we can do. what do you think? the solution that we suggested requires only one trade—off, a temporary trade—off, which is those of us, i will include myself in that, who have some level of vulnerability to disease from this virus do what is appropriate to shield ourselves, if we so wish, while letting young people go about their business, building up herd immunity, so that we return to a level of risk, which we appreciate and accept and operate with for a whole range of other infectious diseases, like the flu.

i think it would be absolutely disastrous if we had to alter our behaviour permanently to deal with these respiratory infections. we have already come to an agreement globally and at the level, we have already had in place a social contract that allows these diseases to exist at pandemic equilibrium, and yes, they do cause some deaths, but that is something we have accepted, because if we live lives under a set of restrictions that absolutely prevents these diseases from circulating, then we will cause irreparable damage to the young and to the poor. professor gupta, i want to put this quote to you, because greg from yale university an expert, says that your

herd immunity strategy, and i quote, "is about calling the heard of the sick and disabled," and he says it is grotesque. i know. i saw that. it was intensely dismaying because of course, what our declaration does is put forward a proposal of how to protect those who are vulnerable. so i think it is really quite deflamatory. all right, ok. that is your response to him. evonne, i hope you won't mind me saying but i know that you are over 60, i will not divulge your exact age, but where do you stand on this? if there is no vaccine, is that going to affect the kind of day—to—day activities that you do? i would continue to be living pretty much as i live at the moment, i have some suspicions about herd immunity because at the moment, people are being reinfected, so i'm not too sure how that works either. i'm just hoping that somewhere somebody finds some sort of solution to help and allow

everybody to return to some level of normality. 0k. let's go to the capital of lithuania to a student there, arnas. my question is, there has been a lot of misinformation about the virus from the start of the pandemic. how do we know who we can trust and what measures are being taken to control the possible falsified information online? for instance, both facebook and twitter have hidden a post in which president trump has claimed that the coronavirus was less deadly than the flu. thank you. to give you some figures, 210,000 people have died in the united states from covid—i9. and the worst flu season was 2017 to 2018, when 61,000 people died in the us. so you are right there to question the facts. professor gupta. flu kills, every year,

650,000 people globally. and that is it at endemic stage. it has reached an equilibrium state. at its pandemic state, in 1918, flu killed over 50 million people. so we mustn't compare apples with oranges here. hopefully, when the coronavirus settles through endemic equilibrium, it will kill no more people than the other four circulating coronaviruses kill at the moment. so that is not a fact comparison. coronavirus is definitely not as deadly in young people as the flu. there is a lot of misinformation but it has been used in the very strange ways. for example, this idea that reinfection means that you can't have herd immunity. it is a complete nonsense. but that has been widely promoted. dr swaminathan, is president trump right then that coronavirus is less deadly

than the flu ? we've just heard professor gupta say that in 1918, it killed 50 million. on that point i think the data clearly shows that the infection fatality rate ratio of the virus is higher than influenza in certain age groups above the age of 35. so there is a difference between the two viruses and perhaps that is because this is a new virus for the first time in human beings. but i think the point our young friend was making is a very important one and that is about what we call the infodemic, the overload of information that people have been subjected to. and this is a mix of credible and good information that helps people, and a lot of misinformation and rumours and some willfully done and some unknowingly done, and it is very difficult for a young person or anyone to differentiate. so we have been working with a lot of the social media

companies, helping them to direct users when they type in search words, to credible sources of information. ok, let's go to our final question, back to indonesia, and addie. i have a question on the pandemic. since the months since the who declared it a pandemic, it is getting more and more difficult for people to continue sticking to restrictions, both for our life and personally. how does this pandemic affect the global response? dr swaminathan, pandemic fatigue and we also heard boris johnson, the prime minister here in the uk, talking about people being covid weary. how does that factor into the global response? of course there is fatigue. there is fatigue among front—line workers, there is fatigue among government officials who have been at this and the public who want to go out and live life as they were used too.

so i think this is where we need to talk about it, support each other, we do see an end to this pandemic. i think it is very important to remind ourselves that in a year from today, we will be in a different situation than when we are now. but until then, it's our responsibility to keep doing the right things. ok, thank you. professor gupta, pandemic fatigue factor, or covid weary. what is your response? i am not surprised it is kicking in. what we really need to do is bring this pandemic to an end as soon as possible and as i said before, the way to do that is to allow the natural immunity to build up, we cannot afford to wait for a vaccine. so there's something very problematic here about how we have responded to this pandemic. we need to bring it to an end and we need to think very, very carefully about all those people who are suffering. thank you very much

indeed, professor gupta. and that is all for this edition of global questions: covid: should we learn to live with it? i think we've had two relatively opposing views there on the way forward. thank you to my questioners who joined us from all over the world and of course to my two panelists, dr soumya swaminathan, the chief scientist of the who, and professor sunetra gupta, from oxford university, and to you of course, wherever you have been watching watching this programme. remember, if you want to be part of global questions next time, please e—mail us. remember, we are the programme that brings you the trend lines that are behind the headlines. until the next time, for me, zeinab badawi, and the rest of the global questions team, goodbye.

hello there. during friday, we saw colder air sweep down across the whole of the uk. accompanied by a fair number of showers as well. this weekend, it remains on the chilly side. again, a mixture of sunshine and showers. the showers much more widespread though on saturday. we have the colder air because the winds are coming in from the north or northwest. and that is because we have lower pressure sitting to the east of the uk, and higher pressure towards the west. during the second half of the weekend, the high pressure moves a little bit closer, so the winds will not be as strong, and the showers will be few and far between. saturday could start dry, sunny and cold across southern england but the winds are blowing down these bands of showers which could be heavy at times and pushing them southwards. the showers continue to rattle into northern scotland. sheltered central scotland seeing fewer showers and more sunshine. and the afternoon may well be drier across northern england. it may not be too many showers for the southwest of england. 1a degrees likely here. for many, it is 11 to 13 degrees again and feeling

colder and the blustery winds especially when the showers come along. the winds will gradually ease after dark. the showers continue to run into coastal areas. for many in—land parts, it becomes dry and clear and cold. those temperatures will be down to five, 6 degrees in some towns and cities but easily two or three in some rural areas. on sunday, we have one or two showers first thing for northern ireland, wales and the southwest. they won't last long. the showers there are will be running into eastern scotland and down those north sea coast of england where the winds are still rather keen. elsewhere, the winds will be much lighter, we will see a build—up of cloud developing but it should be dry with sunny spells and temperatures very similar again, 12, 13, maybe 1a degrees on sunday. the weather starts to change as we move into early next week. instead of those northerly winds, we look to the atlantic and we have weather fronts coming in from the west. much more cloud around on monday. we have outbreaks of rain, steadily pushing its way eastwards. it does mean for some western areas in the afternoon we see sunshine, giving temperatures

a boost, but after a dull, damp day and a cold start across eastern areas of uk, temperatures may struggle to get into double figures. and there is more wet weather around as we head into tuesday as well. we end up with low pressure sitting across more southeastern part of the uk, bringing wind and tain. further northwest, higher pressure, so it should be drier and brighter.

this is bbc news, i'm lewis vaughan jones. our top stories: back on the campaign trail: president trump will make a public appearance on saturday with a speech from the white house. his opponent, joe biden, is also out looking for votes — but the second debate between the two men is cancelled. hurricane delta makes landfall on the us gulf coast, with winds of more than 100 miles per hour. and voices of the hong kong protests: we speak to students shot by live rounds at point—blank range who now face imprisonment.