I want to talk about your experience in China in a minute.

But first of all, your boss, the head of the WSB K, put out a mortality rate number yesterday that had us all gasping frankly, 3.4% mortality rate for those infected, which is quite a lot higher than the 1% that we were kind of dealing with roughly beforehand explained that number to us and why he's now made that public.

Well, when you look at the numbers in China, there's different numbers, right?

And I think one of the things that worried the director general was that people were cherry picking the lowest possible numbers, and they were they were underestimating what this disease could actually do and the number that you heard yesterday.

That's if you take from the beginning of the outbreak, including Wuhan in the area's worst hit right through to today, and all of China the number is over is over three on DDE.

What people often do is they just look at those provinces outside of who bay and and where Wuhan is, and they calculate from once people really knew what they were doing, and they say Okay, at that point, it was down around 1% or under 1%.

But you know, what the director general was highlighting was, if you don't get on this fast, if you don't know what you're doing, if you're not taking care of your older population properly, this is going to have worse mortality than you're expecting.

And we have to be careful, Matt, Not not to extrapolate directly from China.

China has a different demographic than the UK, and also they're really, really good at keeping people with this disease alive long enough just to survive it.

Okay, But should we not be treating the three and 1/2 percent mortality rate as our benchmark?

Is that the new number that we should be looking out for?

All of us?

No way you should be looking at is you know, this is a serious disease.

1% 2% 3%.

This is a serious, dangerous disease.

What you should be looking at and sort of madam's out a little dictatorial here.

But what we do is how many people are going to get severe deal and are we going to have to put in specialized centers and possibly ventilate to help them get through this and possibly do that for a few weeks.

How many people are gonna have mild disease that we're going to have to put in repurposed facilities, et cetera, to be ableto make sure they're not infecting other people.

We should be looking at those numbers because that's how you're gonna manage and control this and bring your mortality down.

We know it's a bad, dangerous disease.

How do you bring your mortality down?

You concentrate your resources used short in the time frame to make sure you can identify.

And very quickly you look at the high risk ones and get them into the specialized centers in case they crashed.

These are the things that we should focus on mortality rates.

It's gonna be different in different contexts.

It doesn't have to be that high.

That's the key message.

Okay, so when you went to China, what did you discover there?

That should become a lesson to all of us all over the world.

The first thing that we discovered that I think the most important message and I have to admit I went there with quite a bias because this is a response.

Ira Torrey pathogen.

And we're not used to seeing these kind of viruses controlled through these traditional uh, that's a approaches.

And that was a first year big learning from China.

And then But in terms of applying that outside of China, I think the critical things that China did well, where first of all the population knew what it was looking for it they knew what this disease was.

They knew where to go to get tested, and they could be isolated and taken care of very, very quickly.

People were part of the solution.

They were the surveillance system.

You weren't waiting for it to walk into hospitals and infect the hospitals.

They had a very well in foreign population.

Then they had planned the capacity to be able to isolate these debate cases, and they planned the capacity be able to find the coast contacts, quarantine them, and then take care of them for the 14 days during which 5 to 10% of them would become cases on big take wings are those and what worries me?

Always mad as everyone starts with like we can't do a China did, and I said, Well, why not?

They said, Well, we can't locked out a whole city nice.

While China didn't either.

There thousands and thousands of cities, they locked down a few, which where it had really gotten out of control, and they never, ever did that again.

The only did it in one province, not in the other 30 because they figured out how to how to respond.

But still, it's It's a much bigger countries.

Well, I mean, they locked down effectively 60 million people, which is virtually the whole population of the UK.

Can you seriously imagine this government doing something similar in a country like ours?

I would be seriously surprised and and frankly disappointed if the country ever got into a situation where they even have to contemplate that.

And the great thing you're seeing that is that, you know, remember this.

It's not a function of the virus.

Whether or not you get in a situation like China's.

It's a function of how you respond and what you're seeing as a result of the work of public health thing than the any Jess et cetera.

Is there fighting these cases fast jumping on the transmission chains.

They're getting them under control.

You should never get in.

That situation should ever have to even contemplate it.

And there's a lot of things you could do before you get there.

But so, to be clear, China had to take these draconian measures because it didn't keep its on the ball at the beginning of this infection.

Well, no one would have had their eye on the ball.

This was a new virus nobody had seen before.

They have to isolate the virus, find out what they were dealing with.

Find out how it was transmitted.

Find out that test different approaches.

They did all the testing.

And now the rest of the world.

The rest of China knows howto how to approach this thing.

So you know, and look, Matt and fairness.

And I'm not saying this to to be popular in China.

Every other country in the world is known about this for six weeks, and we're still seeing it get out of control in these places.

That never happened in other parts of China afterwards.

Okay, So what is the rest of the world not doing that?

There should be doing right now?

Countries like Italy or perhaps us in a couple of weeks.

Or Iran, South Korea?

Well, lots of countries are doing the right thing, but we have to what?

We have to look at matters or any barrier to finding cases very, very quickly.

Getting him tested and getting my slated.

And those barriers can be simple things as simple as our materials available in the right language.

Does a population really know that?

It's they're looking for a fever and a cough.

Not a cold, not a running nose.

This is a different thing.

Did they know what they're looking for?

Then?

Do they know how to get tested?

What I've heard in some places, people say, is calling your GP.

Well, try and get through to your GP during the day, right?

And maybe there are for those Friday writer and then they're out for the weekend.

You've left this infected person potentially in the community for three or four more days.

You have to look at every single thing that might slow down the chance of you finding that person, isolating him to help them survive the disease and to help others not get infected.

That's what we've got.

Study.

There's a big debate about closing down schools.

What's the point of closing down schools of kids?

According to the evidence?

A very unlikely to get this.

Well, kids are a pretty special part of our population.

A Matt.

I have one of them way over.

There you go.

So So we do.

You know, we exercise an abundance of caution with our Children, and that's a good thing.

But what?

We, uh, what you would And in terms of what you just said, we actually don't know what happens with Children in this disease.

It appears that they're less likely to get infected.

It appears that the less likely to get a sick.

But a lot of that may be an artifact of the fact that this happened in China at the start of the Spring Festival.

Because remember the Spring Festival in China, all the schools are closed for two weeks, and then they extended them.

So we don't really know what would have happened If Children were exposed to big doses of this thing in school environment.

Would they have gotten sicker?

We don't know.

Probably not in my mind, but would they have carried the virus back to their families and caused more outbreaks that way?

Quite possibly.

We simply don't know.

So one of the things we're looking at in places like Italy and and and others that get infected our do have we seen any school clusters that might other result in more sickness kids or help spread it.

So far, the evidence isn't there.

And it's one more, you know, piece of the puzzle that we haven't got the tools to study property.

Yet you soon will.

But not quite yet.

Okay, just just to bring it back to Britain.

And we just had the numbers out over 80 cases now in this country.

It was 50 yesterday.

What canyon for?

From that your cases are increasing quite obviously.

And it's what it's hard to infer from the number what we need to know, where they geographically clustered and clustered in time and clustered around certain events.

Or are these just popping up all over the country?

And it's It's evidence of widespread transmission that had been missed, mild cases that have been missed, so the number itself doesn't tell you anything or everything.

What it may be telling you is the population is way more aware.

They're getting the much more fast, and that could be a very good sign.

So it depends a little bit.

What's behind it.

Okay, I'm finally You came back from China 10 days ago.

I gather, Why don't you self isolating?

Because you isolate the people who are the cases, right?

So I'm clearly not the case.

And then the people that I don't know because you've been tested?

Yes, actually, I have been tested, but that was for a different reason.

But the first is is is not a case.

Well, I'm not.

I'm not ill.

Let's say the second thing is I'm not a close contact of anyone, so I'm not quarantine.

So isolation is what you do for the case so the virus doesn't spread.

Quarantine is what you do for someone who is a contact.

So if they get infected, they won't spread in the meantime, but but you're not isolating in the sense of the have the virus unnecessarily.

And neither was I wasn't even a m.

Let's say a low risk contact never came in contact with any cases, never came in contact with any known contacts everywhere I was, the incidents was falling, you know, And I washed my hands every half hour.

I wore a mask as I was in China, but social distancing.

You take all the right precautions.

And that way we have to be careful because you could end up in a situation where you've got 80 cases in the U.

K.

And people start playing wise in the whole of the UK isolated.

No, you have to.

It's got to be a risk based decision, but we're gonna be very careful, obviously.

But other people have come back from the places that you've been to like Wuhan have been told her basically stay self isolated for two weeks.

Yes, so so different countries have different, uh, recommendations and W h o.

All of our of our guidance is really evidence based.

We try and identify the evidence and the bass guidance.

Now Switzerland were based uses the W H O.

Guidance takes it.

You know I'm not the off the shelf but implements that in other countries they often decide well, we want to add X y and sad to it for various reasons on dhe, that's the case in some countries where they isolate.

But the reality is in Wuhan.

Now, remember, I went into Wuhan.

15 million people were in apartment buildings.

I was in a big, empty bullet burned by myself.

Our team.

We think we came in less contact with people who hunt than anywhere I've been since one very brief and final one.

Is there anything you tell us about the average age of those people who are deceased as a result of this disease?

Yeah, this is a tragic thing and that it is generally the population over 65 depth.

When you get over 80 the mortality rates skyrocket.

But as soon as you get over 60 65 that should be very concerning here in the West because we have older populations and also we need to remember is all of the mortality is not in the older age group.

There is young, healthy people that die rapidly of this disease, and we don't understand why I spent a lot of time in China talking to Doc's trying to understand what do you think's going on?

And they didn't even have a gut feeling, and that's concerning that must be very scary.

It is.

Now, remember, we don't want to scare populations.

This is a disease that could be managed.

That you can respond to.

The population is the most important part.

It's the surveillance system.

It's what gives you the speed.

And if you take the right precautions, you know, follow the advice.