Professor Jonathan Van-Tam used one of his characteristic analogies to explain why he did not believe the South African variant would become dominant in the UK.
England’s deputy chief medical officer told the BBC the mutation first identified in Kent accounts for more than 90% of cases and there had been fewer than 200 cases of the South African strain.
“If you are running a bath and you have got the hot water tap on and you add in a very small amount of cold water, so the cold tap is running as well but at really a very low volume, your bath water is basically going to remain hot,” he said.
“It’s only if that cold tap was gushing much more than the hot tap, the cold water would take over.
“That’s probably the best analogy I can give you at the moment. There are no signs that South African variant is running at that speed at the moment and therefore I don’t frame it as something that is going to be a dominant issue in the next few months.”
