Duncan Jarvis

So you would have thought it would be in there and organising this better themselves.

And in one of our other podcasts, we talked to Suri Moon about the sort of international response to this.

And it seems that there is no mechanism by which internationally we can really respond to a drug shortage like that.

The WHO doesn't have the power to force companies to make these things.

There is no way of kind of equably distributing these drugs amongst all the different countries where it would be available.

So there's a lot to learn, I think, throughout the chain.

Well, we'll see if that happens.

Thank you for that update, Helen.

Carl, you picked up on a point there that, you know, these are things that we've known for a long time.

And that was something else that you've brought to the table about smoking.

We've known about the harms of this for a long time, and yet it comes around again in COVID.

Yeah, and I suppose it would take a while to see if that's worked.

Do we know how much disease and death smoking causes when we compare it to COVID-19?

Perhaps.

Well, we mentioned death and we're going to come back to that in a moment.

But before that, Helen, back to you.

You have been looking at care homes and this was prompted by some worries you had about treating people in care homes.

And as we seem to be coming back to all the time in this, is that this pandemic is just exposing the cracks in all of the systems we have in evidence generation and in the way we provision care and the way we deal with patents on medicine.

It's all just sort of exposing the cracks.

So if you're in the UK, this week you will have seen that there is some new data that's come out from the ONS about the death rate here.