Norman Swan

speaker

10,274 appearances 109 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2020 last heard 11 Aug

Norman Swan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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What's That Rash? · Vaccines arrive in Australia. Now the challenge begins · 15 Feb 2021 podcast

Now, they don't really understand fully why that was the case, but what they think might be happening is that as you age, but also as your BMI goes up, the mucus lining your lungs changes and may be more conducive to a virus or a bacterium growing there and therefore to spread. matched

So there is a notion that matched

Such people may be more likely to spread, whether they're super spreaders or not is another matter. matched

But what we've also seen in the coronavirus pandemic is that it's almost certainly just as much the fact that you go into a super spreading environment, a restaurant, a poorly ventilated area, a hotel where you've got positive pressure going out into the corridor and so on. matched

Yeah, they show that the COVID-19 deaths are three and a half times higher than influenza. matched

We on Coronacast have talked over the last year between six and ten times. matched

It really depends on where you've been treated. matched

There's recent studies out of the United States showing that if you are in a poor area with an overburdened hospital, the death rates can be really, really high. matched

The rate of death is really hard to calculate. matched

It's how much testing you're doing. matched

It's where you're being treated, whether you get access to evidence-based care and so on. matched

So it's a really difficult one. matched

But there's no question that it's higher. matched

And in fact, yesterday on local radio in Western Australia, I had a kind of argument with – a polite one – matched

A listener calling in saying, well, if it's only one, you know, the overall death rate's one or 3%, you know, that's not a problem. matched

It's not a high mortality rate. matched

And the point we just must never forget is that, and where it takes us right back to February, March of last year, the beginning of CoronaCast, is that if you get hundreds of thousands of people infected, 1% is a lot. matched

One death is a lot that doesn't need to happen. matched

It's preventable. matched

And it's high numbers when you've got high numbers infected. matched

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