Carl Hennigan

So coming up in the future, as we said, we want to talk to someone, perhaps Harlan Krumholtz, about the natural history of this.

We're interested in the WHO and how they're pulling together guidelines in a world with such disparate access to resources that mean that localising information is incredibly important.

So if you haven't done so, have a look at us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts from.

And there you can subscribe so you don't miss out on any of that.

So until next week, it's goodbye from me.

Take care.

Hi, Duncan.

Yeah, no, it's very interesting.

The Office for National Statistics, ONS, each week on a Tuesday updates their data set.

And I have to say they're doing an amazing job in improving the granularity of their data, putting more evidence in.

In what we call week 15, up to 10th of April, there were 18,516 deaths registered compared with a five-year average of 10,520.

So that's an excess of 7,996 deaths, 75% more than what we'd expect at this time.

In week 14, we had 6,000 excess deaths.

So it's ticked up again.

And there are lots of very important caveats in the data.

For instance, of the 7,996 excess deaths, 6,213, 78% mentioned COVID, but 22% did not mention COVID on the death certificates.

A couple of important issues as well is that greater than 70% of all the deaths occurred in over 75s.

So this is disproportionately affecting elderly populations in a devastating way.

But there's one really important issue I think within the coding that was very interesting for me was

One of the aspects about SARS is it's the clues in the name, it's sudden acute respiratory syndrome.