Carl Hennigan

That might be a bit controversial, but I think you've got to think radically in these times about what are we trying to achieve when we talk about healthcare.

Stopping smoking is the number one health benefit in the world to prevent particularly non-communicable diseases, but also the complication of

of communicable diseases.

Well, yeah, it's huge in terms of the number of deaths and life years lost.

It's far greater than COVID-19.

And interestingly, you start to, particularly things like heart attack, immediately when you stop smoking, you start to get benefits within 48 hours really quickly because of its impact on platelets and stickiness.

But in a respiratory infection, people who smoke

you remember that what happens is they have problems their cilia can't clear their airways they have this like sinks of gunk that sit there in their lungs so they're much more likely to get bacterial complications get pneumonia and all the evidence shows if you give up smoking you reduce your risk from respiratory infections therefore the benefits will be significant not just for the covid but for all of the other diseases that smoking affects

It is.

I also thought, and this is a bit, but I wondered what happened if we end up with this mask.

You have to wear masks outside all the time.

How's that going to work if you're a smoker?

You're going to have great difficulty with the mask and smoking.

So masks could have a second effect to cut down on people's ability to smoke.

And maybe that's the real purpose of them.

Look, it's really interesting.

We've heard a lot about ITU critical care beds, about hospitals in all of this COVID outbreak.

And the way I think of the problem here is the iceberg phenomenon.

At the tip of the iceberg is the critical care beds, 5,900 of them.

Then you've got the hospital beds.