Carl Hennigan

And you can do that with a clinical committee.

You can do it very rapidly.

And so give you an example.

If somebody was admitted to hospital with four comorbidities, had a major ST elevation MI and also had COVID, you might go, hmm, this may be a secondary event because actually look at all the other parameters.

They were so bad and the infection was likely contributed but didn't cause it.

Whereas if you had a younger person who came in,

with ARDS, had respiratory and viral pneumonia, had a respiratory arrest, you're likely to go, we are putting direct causation on COVID.

At least you would have that answer.

And the problem is in places like Lombardy at the moment, and some of the Italian, is everybody who's got COVID is being called as a COVID death.

In the longer run, and I'm talking to people in Italy, we will be ascertaining how many deaths were directly contributable to the agent.

And we always know when you come after the event, many deaths are not assigned to the infection and assigned to other causes.

And I'll give you a good example.

For instance, if you'd basically got run over in the street today and you went into hospital and died in hospital and they said to you, oh, by the way, post-mortem, you already had coronavirus.

Would you attribute that death to coronavirus?

And that's an extreme example.

And I think that's how you have to think of the problem.

What we know in all these outbreaks is wherever we start, they come in with very cautious models, which are the worst case scenario.

And the 80% estimate is basically a doomsday prediction in my mind.

There's a recent modelling study that's in The Lancet come out of Singapore that said actually with a row of 2.5, you would have only ever got to 30% of the population infected.

there's modelling studies coming out that are saying 30% of the population are already infected if you've got half the people are asymptomatic.