president—electjoe biden. the uk has recorded its highest daily coronavirus death toll — more than 1,500 people have died. fergal keane has this special report from imperial health care's st marys and charing cross hospitals in london. it is britain's tale of two realities — locked down streets much busier than before, and just minutes from here... even though i can't hear what you're saying, you are very safe. the voices of one pandemic day. there are a lot of noises going on. lam drwong. i'm the consultant, lovely to meet you. how are you feeling today? so much better. i genuinely thought i was going to die. i i surrendered. it was the stage where suicide, for me, was probably an easieri option than to go through... i cannot put into words, i honestly cannot put i into words how terrifying and how merciless - i was to it, six days ago. i genuinely thought i was never going to see my family again. i in the cpap unit at st mary's hospital, oxygen is applied to help breathing. since we first visited last april in the first wave, the ward has been expanded and knowledge is far greater. we are now a lot more aware of the propensity to deteriorate very quickly, and we're a lot more vigilant at monitoring patients. nowhere is that vigilance more important than intensive care. this is charing cross hospital. sorry, i'm just having a bit of an emergency. the patient�*s blood pressure has suddenly dropped. shall wejust get him head down? a very quick and simple manoeuvre is lie a patient�*s head flat down and itjust improves the blood pressure, get the feet up in the air. people can deteriorate very quickly? very rapidly. it's incredibly sudden. the swift intervention worked. it's daunting to watch the pressure now faced by medical staff. across imperial�*s three london hospitals, they're stretched, coping with the surge in cases. it's emotionally and psychologically totally exhausting. you're constantly thinking about work and the pressures and knowing that the nurses are really stretched and that there aren't enough on duty, and that's incredibly stressful and very difficult to switch off from. every hospital is its own community. a story of interdependence at every level. from caterers like maria from india and graca from portugal, to a cleaner like sarah from sierra leone, who came to the uk as a child to escape civil war. what's it like being part of this effort to beat covid? yes, i'm happy to be part of this to save people, because i like saving people. what's changed since i was last here? well, the sheer volume of cases, the intensity, and a sense that the staff still are immensely professional, of course, but they're getting tired, and why wouldn't they be? and i also pick up frustration with people who flout the rules and those voices in the public sphere who challenge lockdown regulations or try to play down the pandemic. i'm sorry, it's just crazy. they need to see this. there are young people, fit, well, people of all ages just being struck down by this virus, and it does kill people. it's not fake news, it's not made—up, it's real. staff aren't cut off from the reality of lockdown for the wider community — the mental health, the work issues. the spring days of clap for carers, when we filmed dr ali sanders outside her home, seem very distant. for people who have lost theirjobs or who are struggling to survive, i think we do really understand that this is... people probably feel like they have had enough, but the vaccine is rolling out, it is our only way out of this, and we'll get there eventually. at st mary's hospital, robert taylor recites the lord's prayer in gratitude for his deliverance and the medics fighting covid, today, every day. fergal keane, bbc news. now on bbc news: guatemala's lost world. located in northern guatemala, the maya biosphere reserve is the largest rainforest north of the amazon and one of the world's most important hotspots for biodiversity. it also was once the heart of the maya civilisation. today, hundreds of houses, fortifications, temples and other structures lie hidden beneath the jungle. i like this part. but some archaeologists are determined to change that. they've devoted their careers to getting the jungle to give up its secrets, and new technology has revealed that, despite decades of work, they have only begun to scratch the surface. there's a deep hole, and that's where they're digging right now. car starting don't let me down. the maya city of holmul has been an obsession of archaeologist francisco estrada—belli's for the last 20 yea rs. he calls it the gift that keeps on giving. let's try not to get stuck. yeah. in recent years, his work has been aided by the use of lidar, a technology currently transforming archaeology. i've come to holmul, on the border with belize, to learn more about what estrada—belli has discovered. this was one of the most populous places on earth a thousand years ago, if you think about it. yeah! we're already estimating 8 to 11 million people in an area of 9,000 km2. and yet they were using very sustainable practices so that they could do this for 2,000 years. and so, you started excavating... ..in holmul, in 2000. that was our first season, yeah. it was very adventurous. we worked for two weeks, and then it started raining. we didn't have any cars and the roads were all flooded, so we got on out on horses. the city of holmul dates back to 800 bc. it was abandoned 1,700 years later. one of its mysteries that estrada—belli has been trying to solve — its empty tomb. i think i know why they abandoned it, because the date of the building matches with a guy who's supposed to be from here, being sacrificed at tikal, in the year 748. 0k... and after that, pretty much all monumental construction stopped here. so, tell me what that would have meant. so, tikal was defeating its archenemy, the snake kingdom, and they already defeated the actual snake kings and now they were going after its former allies and vassals. this is historical archaeology. we don'tjust talk about processes any more and theories, now we talk about specific events, specific people, because we can read the inscription. and yet, this tomb was almost destroyed before estrada—belli, or any another archaeologist, were able to discover it. and here is the tomb chamber. wow. looters came and dug a hole right behind this doorway. and they missed by the structure with the frieze by 27 metres, i'll show you. so that's the frieze right there... whoa! so that's the corner image of one of the dead kings. you can imagine what they would have done. they would have said, oh, my gosh, there's definitely something cool behind this and they would just blast through it. it's all there and it goes for eight metres that way the notes were rather incomplete because the archaeologist died shortly after working here, by a mysterious disease that he contracted here. he returned from here with a massive sore on his nose which never healed. that's what happens with this bug. eventually he died, he never finished his reports. it was actually published by one of his friends at harvard, posthumously. they forgot to mention this tunnel, and he had found the window of an earlier pyramid and stopped. so, we kept digging and there's this massive carving that explained what the temple is all about. so are these beetles still around? yes. 0h, great! it's called the assassin bug. good, i'm glad we're going in now. welcome to the underworld. it even made a sound. turn the light on. watch your step. we're going to walk around the exterior and go everything still there, we found it, we found it, the chamber was completely sealed. when we open, we still feel that cold breeze and like a smell, like something was in the putrefaction process, when we open it. in 2010, when we found the tomb of the fierce king of el zotz, we were working on it. unfortunately, looters can come and they are really well organised and can take everything from you. one day we hired a group of guards to protect it, but it didn't work because some of them tried to too. i confronted them, one of them put his gun shot. at the time, i think i was a good liar. itold him, you know, this is a computer. we have internet, which we don't have, and we are filming everything. and that's when it stopped. another major challenge for the maya biosphere reserve is illegal logging, often tied to drug trafficking. and when the jungle is cleared, it doesn't just affect the animals in the rainforest, but the maya sites, which are often irretrievably damaged. they will clear the forest around archaeological sites, plant the marijuana, loot the sites while the marijuana was growing and then collect to harvest. and put all they got on small planes to go to the us. several illegal activities are still going on in guatemala. illegal logging, which is not a problem here specifically, but in other parts of this region, it's a big problem. drug trafficking. we're fortunate here at holmul, but out at western guatamala, they cut the forest to build airstrips, airplanes from colombia, land there, and it's a trans shipment place to go across to mexico and from there to the us, and they burnt all the forest in the process. whereas this area has done much better because it was given in concession to local communities for sustainable logging. so in the last 20 years, the local communities have stopped the drug trafficking, the land invasions, the deforestation, and that's why sites like this are still covered by forest. we think what we have in place here works much better because the local communities are empowered and have an incentive to protect the forest. which is the sustainable logging. for as long as they can continue, they will protect the forest. freddy molina is vice president of the arbol verde concession which has been given to local residents for sustainable logging. while logging might seem an anathema to the forest, it turns out that concessions like these can have quite the opposite effect. by by giving local residents financial incentive to run the forest, community concessions like this one have actually protected the reserve. one of the biggest challenges to archaeologists in the maya biosphere reserve isn't narco—trafficking, logging or even looting. it's a fact that it's extremely difficult to find or identify structures in a jungle as thick and wild as this one. and that's where a technology that's relatively new to archaeology, lidar, has been transformative. so, this hill is supposedly a pyramid. they think it might be may be as big as the great pyramid, the mundo perdido, it's definitely steep. it looks like a hill. so, it's pretty amazing that they're able to find that out through lidar. we're right here. 0nly10% of tikal has actually been excavated and discovered? this feels very indiana jones. lidar is a type of remote sensing technology that's used to create extraordinarily detailed 3d maps and representations. in the reserve, lidar is being employed in two ways, from aircraft to create topological maps, and from hand—held scanners to build better 3d models of a particular site or structure. the process of beaming lasers from aircraft, the largest survey, is the initiative of the foundation for mayan cultural and natural heritage. it's amazing. probably a pre—classic structure. it's massive. this is one of the bigger temples of tikal. what is lidar, exactly? what makes it such a great tool? it really strips off the forest canopy with billions of laser beams that map individually, each return, every time they hit something on the surface. that will give tremendous use for the forests and the biomass. and you said billions of laser beams. how many billions of laser beams? i think our first data said 60 billion returns. so, that's an incredible amount of data. and how long did it take to collect that? really, only a couple of weeks. it was something like eight flights. 2,100ka of area is covered in that amount of time. you obviously have a great appreciation for an understanding of how sophisticated the mayans were. yes. but did the lidar increase that understanding even more? yes, the lidar showed without any doubt that we totally underestimated their engineering capabilities in terms of landscape modifications to make the land more sustainable, to irrigate, bringing water to places to cultivate, to stop erosion. it's pretty mind—blowing. that's how i felt. and i thought the mayans were sophisticated already, but not at this scale. one of the sites where lidar has been especially helpful is here, el zotz. lidar is the first step. it shows us everything. it gives us the footprint, but then archaeologists still have to go out, and get there and check it. they have to get there. lidar makes it so that as archaeologists, we don't have to spend all her time figuring out what's there and instead, we can focus in and excavate and addressing questions we want to. so much of our time is spent mapping and just trying to find places, and what lidar�*s shown us is that we weren't very good at it. a lot of sites around here were abandoned at the end of what we call the classic period. around 900, something like that. el zotz had people living here up till the 1300s. we're probably somewhere near the old communal royal, the new spanish road that passed down through central america and supposedly was built on top of a major pre—columbian throughway. but no—one has actually pinpointed where that ran through. we wonder will lidar eventually reveal that for us. that would be amazing. the first king of el zotz was such an important character that a temple was created for him so he would never be forgotten. we have this amber snowboarding from the met office, these other areas that will see the heaviest of the snow, 20 centimetres over the hills by late morning, some snow to lower levels as well. that winter remix continues throughout thursday in scotland and england. underneath that band of wet weather it will be cold, 2—4 . that whether peters out overnight, a much drier day, they could be a lot of cloud, some mist and fog, some sunshine here and there in the north—east and south—west but for more of the country, it will be a chilly day. hello there. we have wet weather across many parts of the country at the moment but it's notjust rain. these are the areas that will see the heaviest of the snow, 20 centimetres over the hill by late morning, slit at lower levels as well. that wintry mix continues throughout thursday in scotland and northern england, further south that benefit with stretches the midlands towards the south—east and there could be sleet and snow in that as well, underneath that band of wet weather it is going to be cold, 2- weather it is going to be cold, 2— four degrees, calder still in the hills. much modified northern wells in the south—west where it should be dry with sunshine in northern ireland. that wet weather dispute about overnight and icy start on friday, emma and cloud, mind you, some mist and fog, some sunshine here and there in the north—east and south—west, but for more of the country it will be a chilly day. welcome to bbc news. i'm mike embley. our top stories: the resolution is adopted without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid upon the table. president trump is impeached for a second time. he's formally charged with inciting insurrection after last week's mob violence on the capitol building. you must go. he is a clear and present danger to the nation and