Has England learned any lessons from the first wave of coronavirus? | Philip Ball

There's still a long way to go to prepare for a winter surge. But the country is no longer as vulnerable as it was in March

No one knows what the next months hold, but suggestions that Britain will be back to normal by Christmas seem unlikely. Already, Leicester, Greater Manchester and Preston have enforced local lockdowns after registering rises in Covid-19 cases, while increases in Spain and Germany are an alarming reminder of the difficulty of controlling this virus. Cold weather could potentially boost the spread of coronavirus and make social distancing outdoors more difficult. The dangers are clear - so is England ready?

We've got to up our game for the autumn," says Ewan Birney, deputy director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. We'll be inside more. Universities and schools will be running. There will be a whole bunch of contacts we don't have now." England has made significant progress over the summer on some of the problems that made the first wave of coronavirus so disastrous. But this still may not be enough, and outcomes depend on factors that are hard to predict.