Welcome to the Fat Emperor podcast.

I'm your host, Iber Cummins.

Hey guys, 15th of August and delighted today to catch up with Dr. Ron Daniels,

who's a consultant in the NHS in intensive care out of Birmingham and has great experience with our recent viral issue to say the least so great to see you

on good to see you iva and thank you for having me on not at all this is obviously a really

important issue and it's great to have real experts to discuss it so maybe briefly very briefly your

experience and kind of a little bit of background.

And then we'll get into the discussion of perhaps this second wave phenomenon.

Of course. And, you know, whilst I am people who look at my posts on social media,

will know that I'm cautiously optimistic right now about this virus and the risk of any second wave. Let's make no bones about

it. When this first struck, it hit hard. It hit hard in London. It then a couple of weeks later

hit hard in Birmingham before travelling to the northwest and then further. This was a horrific

illness. People became very unwell in very large numbers very quickly.

We've heard all of those data.

I think what we're now interested in is what's likely to happen in the immediate and the distant

future.

Yep, for sure.

And maybe just to dwell very briefly, though, on what you mentioned.

So I was putting together the final data for

2020 versus 2018 for Europe in terms of excess mortality and indeed there's maybe 185,000

excess deaths in the Euromomo countries versus around 140,000 in 18 but in 2018 they were

spread over four or five months, whereas obviously

...