🔴NEW: A laboratory leak is now the more likely origin of Covid, MPs have heard, because after two years of searching an animal host has never been found
Dr Alina Chan said there was also a risk that Covid-19 was an engineered virus.
"Right now it’s not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward. But we live in an era where there is so much information being stored that it will eventually come out"
Viscount Ridley said he also believed a lab leak was now the likely origin.
🗣️"After two years we still haven't found a single infected animal that could be the progenitor, and that’s incredibly surprising" telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/1…
➡️“We need to find out so we can prevent the next pandemic," Lord Ridley said.
"We need to know whether we should be tightening up work in laboratories or whether we should be tightening up regulations related to wildlife markets.
"At the moment we are really not doing either"
💬“We also need to know to deter bad actors who are watching this episode and thinking that unleashing a pandemic is something they could get away with.
📈 Omicron is already causing record-breaking case numbers.
But extreme rises are likely to skew admissions and deaths figures to such a point that they may become largely useless in helping to drive policy, writes science editor @sarahknapton
🦠 Dr Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser for UKHSA, predicted that Britain will see around 1m infections a day by the end of the year.
Under modelling by the London School and Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, roughly half the country could be infected with omicron by the spring
📊 The January death rate is around 0.09%, according to ONS.
So on a day of one million infections, we would expect 908 of those people to die naturally over the next month, yet currently all would end up in the Covid data
✏️You can now see how many Oxbridge offers pupils at every school in the UK - as well as international schools - have received each year between 2017 and 2021
📉Our data reveal that some of the country’s most prestigious private schools are now seeing their Oxbridge offers decline sharply while the number of offers made to some state schools have soared
➡️In a press conference from Downing Street on Wednesday night, Professor Whitty, urged “really serious caution” over reports that omicron was leading to fewer hospitalisations than delta
🇿🇦His comments were made after the first major real-world data from South Africa suggested that the country’s omicron wave had led to 23% fewer hospitalisations than when the delta variant was dominant telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/1…