Harlan Krumholz

And what you need to do is to reduce that reproduction number below one.

to make sure, and if you do that, then the virus will die out.

Now, just to say there was an interesting paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine that modelled the reproduction number and said, what's going on in Wuhan?

And you know in Wuhan you're getting these pictures of isolation, people wearing masks, not being allowed to go out.

But the model is it's still about 1.5 with all of them activities going on.

Therefore, that tells you that, in effect, what's happening is it's going to continue to spread.

Well, there are two things that are really interesting about that.

The first is to say this was an intervention targeted at children.

And one of the issues about respiratory infections is all the interventions have the greatest effect when they're targeted at children.

Because if it gets out there in the wild, if you like, beyond Brighton and the epicentre, then what happens is children act as a reservoir for infection.

And there are two things that make children so great as spreaders of infection.

One is their social habits.

Children, you know, stick their hair together.

We cuddle them.

We kiss them.

So we're going to transmit infection.

But then the second thing about children is their cleaning habits tend to be a bit dire.

And so that combination means they become the infection reservoir, if you like.

And once it's in children, we've got these problems.

So trying to get interventions targeted at children when it's out there are really important.