hello this is bbc news. the headlines: mayors in the north of england say the chancellor's coronavirus financial help package doesn't go far enough, and call for additional support. boris johnson will announce new measures on monday to tackle coronavirus in england — with some areas of the north warned they are likely to face tougher restrictions. wearing a face mask in all work places and outdoors should be compulsory, says the british medical association. armenia and azerbaijan agree to a humanitarian ceasefire, following two weeks of intense fighting over the disputed territory of nagorno—kara bakh.

recognition for the uk's unsung heroes of the pandemic as hundreds of key workers and volunteers are awarded in the delayed queen's birthday honours. more at the top of the hour. 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. don't let it dominate your life. that's 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're urging governments to protect the vulnerable and let everybody else get on with their normal activities. that's 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 by video link. let me tell you who's in the hot seat giving the answers this week. well, we have professor sunetra gupta from oxford university in england. now, she's 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 souyma swaminathan is chief scientist for the who,

that's 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 central to controlling the virus. welcome to you all. and i going to put this down and give you all a solitary round of applause. and remember, you, too, can join the conversation. it's #bbcglobalquestions. well, let's get down to our first question straightaway. and it's yusef from the maldives, yusef. what do you want to ask our two panellists? thank you, zenaib. my question is, what would happen if we ended lockdowns and stop the major restrictions? so what would the challenges be like? professor gupta. well, thank you very much for that question. i guess what we've just called for is exactly 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 and lockdowns as soon as you end lockdowns and stop major restrictions, that there will necessarily be an explosion in cases of infection. in fact, that is not what happened over the summer in many countries, in many settings. i mean, 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 lockdowns are really very destructive, as you know, as all some of these major restrictions. so the problem we're faced with is how to juggle that with, of course, the costs of the epidemic itself, which is the deaths that arise from it.

and so we think the way that we can have a sort of win—win situation is by protecting those who we know are at high risk of death — the elderly, frail and some people with particular co—morbidities. if we protect them and 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 rich, full 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 spread. we know that it's highly transmissible, particularly in certain settings.

so what we are encouraging countries to do is to follow and in many countries have done it successfully. we have examples in front of us, particularly in the southeast asian region, where countries have put in place measures without locking down their economies and still keeping the virus under control. and we also recognise different countries are in different stages. and and so it's 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, be they nationwide and still advocating major restrictions? just in a nutshell? could you pin your colours to the mast. so the who never really recommended full 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, 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 lockdowns. what we do recommend is taking action on those situations which encourage this virus to spread. so the three c's, for example, the close settings, the crowded environments and the close contact, those need to be avoided by everyone, young or old, because you can protect just the elderly and the vulnerable in a society where everyone is living together. and then you're going to have a big human cost because ultimately infection will spread from the young to the older. you can't keep them away from their parents or their grandparents. many countries have joint families. so it's not a very practical suggestion to say that the elderly should be cocooned and everyone else should live a normal life. very quickly, let me come back to dr gupta. your plan wouldn't work? the plan would work, first because it's temporary. i mean, the amount of time for which these restrictions

would have to be applied is temporary. what we're 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 would be temporary and it would achieve an equilibrium with the virus that we can't achieve by repeatedly going into lockdown. let me just ask what yusef thinks. yes, i agree with that. but i think there is a certain point that we have to come out and try to live with the pandemic like this, because we cannot. . . this is something very difficult to sustain, to be under lockdown. thanks very much. 0k. let's go to west java in indonesia. what do you want to ask our panellists? thank you very much. so young people may be less vulnerable to the virus, but they are more vulnerable to the long term efforts of how we reform. of how we respond. for example, education, mental health, jobs and environment.

how do we protect them? thank you very much, dr swaminathan? that's a very good question because as the other participant just said, while young people are less have less health impacts from this infection. but 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 are 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 who get very ill or die is less, it's not negligible. but the other effects of this 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's affected people living in poverty. and this is where i think we need to come together. there needs to be a solidarity within countries, within communities and across countries. we've been talking

about the mental health impacts of this for all, for the, 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's particularly a difficult time because of the uncertainties about their own future and what's 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? i think it's absolutely disgraceful what's been done to young people. young people have been asked to pay the price for us not being able to protect the vulnerable. it's true, we haven't been able to protect the vulnerable who are mainly the elderly and and of course, some people who have co—morbidities. but we should have been, 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 that we feel passionately, passionately about this. and that is why we've suggested this alternative, which is actually the only way to get out of this situation. lockdowns only delay the spread of the virus into... in order to reach an accommodation with 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 can't wait until we have a vaccine. we need for this to happen and we need for young people to resume their lives. and we can do that by protecting the vulnerable. that's a concrete solution. to say we will come out of it somehow is not a concrete solution. but we heard dr souyma swaminathan say, look, you know, young people basically don't live in an island, do they, all by themselves.

they interact with their grandparents and all the rest of it. so if you allow them all those freedoms, they're going to go around infecting everybody else. well, that's the whole point, that 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's not something we're a stranger to. that's what we've been doing through lockdowns. so, yes, during the period, which is short three to six months, it would be would have to be the case that grandparents are somehow isolated from the people who might infect them. but that's something surely a point that... over the age of 35, the mortality due to covid—19 starts to climb significantly. so it's, 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. it is... in comparison to the risks that we take on board every day for 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's necessary to teach my students as a university teacher. thank you. let us now go to california to a phd student there. helena archer. helena. i had a two—part question, which is that as we learn about immunity and move forward with vaccination strategies, do we think at this point that the virus has settled fully into our communities? and if that's the case, how do we apply lessons from other diseases like hiv and zika as we learn to adapt to a world with covid—19? all right. so a bit of a compound question there, but i think basically what you're asking is that,

you know, is there evidence that covid—i9 is kind of settling down in our communities? ok, professor gupta, what's the evidence? yes, indeed there is. i mean, in many settings, we've seen it peak and come down, many african countries in particular. we're starting to see that in many states of the us, in parts of the world where we haven't entered into this business of locking things down. we can see this natural process unfold. we have to... and it's absolutely right, that we have to take lessons from other diseases, not hiv, because it's very different. but zika is a similar sort 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 and we can, i think, it's a reasonable expectation that this virus can and will

and maybe already has settled to that level. 0k. dr swaminathan? so it's true that the virus has spread globally and it's it's present in most countries. but there are a handful of countries that managed to contain it very early on have brought it down to an extremely low level, if at all. china's a good example where there are occasional clusters which they're able to then handle and contain very quickly. now, what happens and whether it becomes an endemic infection or not, i think depends on what we do and what actions we take, what countries do over the next several months and the availability, the wide availability of a vaccine. so it is possible that with the natural course of infection and the measures, the strong public health measures that countries are taking with a good vaccine,

that we will be able to contain this infection to a large degree. and perhaps we've done it in the past with sars virus. of course, this one is a little bit different in its properties, but it's possible to contain on the other hand, it's possible also that it just gets established in human beings as yet another viral infection we live with not but that it doesn't cause the kind of illness and death that that we are seeing today because we're able to build that level of population immunity to widespread vaccination. we're alreadyjust leaving vaccines aside. we're already better, aren't we now at treating covid—i9 than 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 this last few months. we also have much better diagnostics.

so we're able to detect people at a much earlier stage and not wait till they're 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 5,000 people every day. yes, of course, in the global mortality rate so far is a million, more than a million, in fact. and it's a huge number, of course, and cases worldwide are over 35 million. let's now go to epsom in england, here in the united kingdom, to yvonne mccabe. yvonne, your question. what i'd like to know is whether there is any long term strategy for living with covid in the event that an effective vaccine is not identified. 0k. let's come to you on that, dr dr souyma swaminathan. what happens if this silver bullet

or this effective vaccine is not discovered? i'd 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 the early studies. and so i think that we will have vaccines. but i think it's a good question, because it's going to be heated because it's going to be a period of time and we are going to have to do all of these other things that we that we are talking about. we have to prioritize, i think, in our own societies what we want. i see the young people who are prioritizing education. i think all of us should prioritize education, but then we may have to d prioritize going to restaurants and pubs and socializing. so we'll have to have some trade—offs in society. all right, professor gupta. so if there's no vaccine, they're going to have to be some tradeoffs in what we can do. what do you think? well, this solution we suggested requires only one tradoff

a temporary tradeoff, which is, i include most of them who have some level of vulnerability to disease from this virus, do what's 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 flu. i think it would be absolutely disastrous if we had to alter our behavior permanently to deal with these respiratory infections. we have already come to an agreement globally and i mean at the level we have already have in place a social contract that allows these diseases to exist at endemic equilibrium. and yes, they do cause some deaths. but that's something we have accepted because if we live lives under a set of restrictions that absolutely prevent these diseases from circulating,

then we will cause irreparable damage to the young and to the poor. all right, professor gupta, i want to just put this quote to you, because greg gonsalves from yale university, an expert, says that your herd immunity strategy, and i quote, "is about culling "the herd of the sick and disabled." and he says it's grotesque. i knew i saw that and 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's really quite defamatory. all right. 0k. that's your response to him there. yvonne, i hope you won't mind my saying, but i know that you are over 60, not going to divulge your exact age. but where do you stand on this? if there's no vaccine?

is that going to affect the kind of day—to—day activities that you pursue? i'll continue living pretty much as i live at the moment. i have some suspicions about herd immunity because at the moment people are being re—infected. so i'm not too sure how that works either. i'm just hoping that somewhere somebody finds some sort of solution to help to allow everybody to return to some level of normality. 0k. well, now let's go to the capital of lithuania, vilnius, to a student there. my question is there hasn't been a lot of misinformation about it, whereas from the start of the pandemic, how do we know who to 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 had

claimed that coronavirus was less deadly than the flu. thank you very much indeed on this. and just to give you some figures, in fact, 210,000 people have died in the united states from covid—19, and the worst flu season was 2017 to 2018 when 61,000 people died in the us. so you're right there to question the facts. professor gupta. flu kills every year. 650,000 people globally. and that's in its endemic state. it's reached an equilibrium state. in its pandemic state, in 1918, flu killed over 50 million people. so we mustn't compare apples with oranges here. hopefully when coronavirus settles to an endemic equilibrium, it will kill no more people than the other for circulating than the other four circulating coronaviruses kill at the moment. so that is not a fair comparison.

coronavirus is definitely not as deadly in young people as flu. so there are there is a lot of misinformation, but it's been. used in very strange ways, for example, this idea that re—infection means that you can't have immunity is a complete nonsense. but that is being widely promoted. 0k. dr swaminathan, is president trump right then? that coronavirus is less deadly than the flu? we've just heard prof gupta there say that in 1918 it killed 50 million the flu. so on that point, i think the data clearly shows that the infection fatality rate ratio of the corbould the saudis for you to a 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's because this is a new new virus for the first time in human beings. but i think the point our young friend was making is a very important point.

and that's about what we call the overload of information that we've 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's very difficult for a young person or anyone to differentiate. so we've 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. 0k. so now let's go to our final question, and it's back to indonesia. it's getting more and more difficult for people to continue stripping restriction both from our life and sort of personally. so how does this endemic fear factor into the global response?

dr souyma swaminathan, so pandemic fatigue. we've also heard borisjohnson, the prime minister here in the uk, talking about people being covid weary. so how does that factor into the global response? of course, there is fatigue. there's fatigue among frontline workers. it's this fatigue among government officials who have been at this and the public who wants to go out and live life as they were used to. so i think this is where i think we need to talk about it. we need to support each other. we do see an end to this pandemic. i think it's very important to remind ourselves that in a year from today, we're going to be in a different situation than where we are now. but then it's our responsibility to keep doing the right things. 0k. thank you, professor gupta. pandemic fatigue factor or covid weary? what's your response? well, i'm not surprised that it's kicking in. what we really need to do is bring this pandemic to an end as soon as possible. as i said before, the way to do that is to allow natural immunity to build up because we can't afford

to wait for a vaccine. so there's something very, very problematic here about how we've 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. well, thank you very much indeed, professor gupta. and that's all from this edition of global questions covid — should we learn to live with it? well, i think we've had two relatively opposing views there on the way forward. thank you to my questioners who have joined us from all over the world and of course, to my two panellists, dr souyma swaminathan who's the chief scientist from the who, the world health organization, and professor sunetra gupta from oxford university. and to you, of course, where have you been watching this program?

remember, if you want to be part of global questions next time, then please e—mail global questions at bbc dot co dot uk. remember, we are the program that brings you the trend lines behind the headlines until the next time for me and the rest of the global question team. good afternoon. the risk north north—westerly wind continues to make it feel chillier today than it has been for most of the week. there will be sheltered sunny spots. when you catch a shower you may well enjoy seeing a rainbow. however, some of the showers are heavy with ha ilstones some of the showers are heavy with hailstones and stand out. on the tops of the scottish mountains some snow. earlier on we had a band of persistent rain moving its way through eastern counties of england. behind it is to showers. sunny

spells and showers for the rest of daylight and clear spells and showers overnight. they come in thick and fast over northern parts of scotland. again, along the south coast, sheltered from the breeze. some areas will see more than others and in that brisk wind it will not feel warm, temperatures in double figures for most but only 13 or 14 in southern areas and the heavy showers, they will drop. brisk winds blow the showers in many areas. the winds will alleviate any fog problems and keep temperatures mostly problems and keep temperatures m ostly a bove problems and keep temperatures mostly above freezing, dipping down to two or three in parts of northern england. a bright and sunny start in these areas but showers in the north. high pressure toppling in from the west tomorrow. some respite from the west tomorrow. some respite from that brisk north wind and showers away from eastern england and eastern scotland. temperatures

will respond to that sunshine. getting higher than today for most but still feeling cold. that ridge of high pressure is a transient feature so by the end of sunday and sunday night and monday we are already seeing the next atlantic low pressure, it's weather fronts. clearing up through the morning on monday in northern ireland were showers following. that rain reaches all parts. another ten to 15 millimetres of rain falling from that weather front and it won't be warm because we have got the north—west breeze and the cloud and the rain. for the rest of the week, the rain. for the rest of the week, the greatest risk of rain in southern and eastern areas. drive further north and west.

this is bbc news. the headlines at five... mayors in the north of england say the chancellor's coronavirus financial help package doesn't go far enough, and call for additional support. the conclusion we have reached is that this package is insufficient to protect our communities as we go in to the rest of the autumn and the winter. boris johnson will announce new measures on monday to tackle coronavirus in england, with some areas of the north warned they are likely to face tougher restrictions. wearing a face mask in all work places and outdoors should be compulsory, says the british medical association. recognition for the uk's unsung heroes of the pandemic as hundreds of key workers and volunteers are awarded in