cases than we've seen ever before numbers that can't be explained away by the rise in testing. japan is trying to isolate a new variant from brazil there's no proof any of them are any deadly but the virus is constantly changing and could eventually make vaccines less effective. but watching evolution take place right in front of our eyes the new coronavirus is doing everything it can to survive becoming clever at jumping from host to host the hope is that we're doing everything we can to survive many big economies are back in lockdown including south africa. this isn't a waiting room it's the treatment room for coffin 19 patients at the hospital in kyle each. one patient goes out to tell us she's been sitting and waiting for 3 days waiting for a bed to become free next door these women reclusive wanted to do with the do more

good than industry do people who work for. dr susan mccown colet has been working here for 9 years but the pandemic is pushing him to his limits a 3rd of his colleagues here have already had the virus. how do you feel with the offer though that sometimes if you forward if you don't have enough for speed from from we don't give enough if you don't want anything in 40 year old in the 1.23 difficulty doing something you're too true. to who do you 1st be able to do that you should with the thought that sometimes 350. on average one person dies we've covered 19 in the hospital every day. there's a small room next door with somewhat better facilities for acute patients waiting for an intensive care bed at another hospital. but the local health minister admits

the not everyone can get an i.c.u. bed most are already full hold it up as a fire fight but then i see. things that embody did it cry oh i see you again but it is what it is what it is that falls on fire. for south africans are battling a new more infectious variant of the virus the fast spread has led to tighter lockdown measures including a ban on alcohol sales and the closure of beaches but police are struggling with enforcing them. only patients over the age of 45 a. now being tested at the state clinics the demand is overwhelming. here in viral were just both going prizes laboratory every 2nd test is positive the peak of the 2nd wave is expected in south africa in mid january but even after that experts expect further waves i fear that neither the current enormous suge that we are

experiencing know nor the arrival of the vaccine sometime in 2 way through to a g 20 won't for a small proportion of the population will be able to make a big difference. the government has said it's already in talks with vaccine manufacturers but there are no details yet. emma hold craft is a molecular epidemiologist how much hope should we be putting in these vaccines so the good news is that your body learns to recognise many parts of the buyer s. when it's exposed to these vaccines or when you've been infected with sars kovi too so even if the virus changes a little bit the hope is your body will still learn to recognise it and be able to mount a really good protective response however it's going to take some time to get enough people vaccinated so that we can really see this impact on the number of cases and it's important to remember that most vaccines need 2 doses before they're fully

effective so we really need people to keep using other non-pharmaceutical protections like hand washing and mask wearing and being aware aerosol transmission until we're certain that the vaccines are helping us to keep the case numbers low but why all the concern about these mutations considering that there is so slight the boss of buy and take told d.w. there would be one percent and that wouldn't affect his vaccines effectiveness so why we also worried. i think one thing that is important to keep in mind is that a lot of the fear about vaccines is hypothetical certainly it's possible that the virus could change enough that your body doesn't recognize it anymore and then your protection could be impacted but until we have a reason to believe that some of these mutations are really having that effect on real people who've been vaccinated i think it's important to keep our worry a little bit in check now certainly there are said mutations that have some concerns from early studies but importantly these have all been done in the lab and

it's very hard to predict what the impact of a lab study actually means in a full size human and a full sized population so i think until we really have evidence that these mutations will in fact axion efficacy we shouldn't be too worried what sort of time frame are we looking at i mean could it speed up the the rate of its mutations so luckily sars could be 2 has a pretty consistent mutation rate we actually call viruses mutations kind of clock like because there's so predictable in how often they happen so we don't expect the virus to mutate faster but one thing we do want to keep in mind is that while we have high case numbers where maximizing the viruses ability to explore different people different immune systems and maybe be put under interesting and unique selection pressures and this might mean that we see a new taishan start rising in prominence because it's been in one of these unique situations we can never completely eliminate that this might happen but clearly the

fewer people that are getting infected the less room the virus has to play in these different environments and hopefully the last chance that we see a mutation that would really rather not see and they might tell me more about what we know about these mutations making people's antibodies less effective in utero lising the virus. so there's been a few studies on some of the mutations that are found in both the 501 y. v $1.00 and $5.00 a one y. v 2 variance those are the variance predominately found in the u.k. and in south africa and the news has been mixed here so what scientists do in these cases is they take the virus and then they expose it to what we call the say around the antibodies of people who've already had sars kovi 2 for some of these mutations it looks like there isn't any impact on how well those antibodies work for some of the other mutations in some cases it seems like it might reduce the efficacy but again these are for single mutations and oftentimes

a few people sara so we really need to keep doing studies to find out not only how widespread might this affect to be but does this actually mean that it impacts the your immunity in a full grown human rather than just in a petri dish and whether this is something we really need to be concerned about the example i tracing or sequencing has become so important. so i do think that one thing that these new variants of really brought to the fore is the importance of jin nomic surveillance and sequencing we can only tell that a new variant might be responsible for a rise in cases if we have sequences that tell us that that virus has a different genetic makeup and importantly because that virus has this unique kind of fingerprint of mutations we can track how it's spread around the world as well which is why we know that this u.k. and south african variants are in different places around the world this is really important as not only does it mean that we can identify variants and the mutations that might be impacting things like transmission we can also understand how the

virus is spreading and whether we can protect countries from getting it or how we can contain it once it's there now the number of sicknesses countries are generating is really different from country to country and it would be great to see a more concerted effort to make sure that we have regular sequences coming in from every country around the world and alcoa's molecular if you give me a logistic thank you very much for being on the show tonight. and let's bring in our science correspondent derrick williams has been looking at your questions surrounding code 90. my a members of the same household almost always infected with the coronavirus after one member is infected. this is an aspect of the pandemic that puzzled scientists from the start you know it kind of makes sense to to reformulate this question to something like if this is a novel pathogen that no one had ever been exposed to before then we should have

all been equally unlikely to get it and to get it equally bad right especially in a shared space like a household but we apparently aren't of one possible reason why is that prior exposure to other coronaviruses might possibly lower risks for some people so their immune systems were maybe a little 4 armed then of course there are also plenty of people who are asymptomatic even when they do catch the disease they just appear for all intents and purposes to be healthy and they remain undetected even though they're carrying sars cove 2 and could maybe give it to others but we should also flip this question and look at the other half of the equation how contagious someone is so not how come some people don't catch the virus but instead why some of us seem to give it more easily to others there's some scientific consensus that for reasons that

remain unclear a subgroup of people often called a super spreaders or super emitters could be driving most of the transmission some experts think just 10 to 20 percent of people who catch covert 19 pass it along to up to 80 percent of all subsequent cases so in other words. if your spouse or your child has the piracy but for whatever reason isn't a super spreader they're less likely to give it to you especially if you follow isolation protocols that said there is broad agreement that during lockdowns transmission still happens more within homes than anywhere else simply because sharing a household with someone who has copd at 19 increases your exposure so statistically at least you're still more likely to get it from a family member then you are from

a stranger. finally the crisis continues to drive innovation he is a mosque for the hearing impaired which is also eco friendly. juliet and i wanted to tackle uganda's waste problem by recycling its mountains of plastic rubbish at the same time as using fashion to take on discrimination against people with disabilities regular mosques where preventing her hearing impaired stuff from liberating these one stuck.

to. the boat. back to. the salt around. the be. good or going to. the beach.

young rock n emigrants. they know the police will stop them. they know that the road is not a solution. they know their flight could be fatal. but going back he's not an option. i'm on and the gravity are stuck in the spanish border area along side other young people there waiting for a chance that will probably never come. shattered dreams starts january 18th on t.w. . we're all set. to go beyond the obvious.

that we're me. as we take on the world. we're all about is the stories that matter to you but about something. good to see what ever it takes to go running. let me go numb a little bit and good to know that w. last made for mines. i was issued when i arrived here i slept with 6 people in a room. it was hard i was fair. i even got white hair. that language no not this gives me a little bunch nipping to entrust the lives of say you.

this is. america's. violence. as president state capitals across the country. passed by the end of the trump presidency. also on the program.