How deadly is Covid 19?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2020
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tim Harford explores what we know about mortality rates in the current pandemic. We discuss the differences between the risks to different age groups, and why that has an effect on a country’s Covid 19 fatality rate. We speak to Dr Hannah Ritchie from the University of Oxford and Dr Daniel Howdon of the University of Leeds in the UK.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:04.5 | With the programme all about the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Haafard. |
| 0:09.2 | We've been living with a global pandemic now for over eight months, and this week we |
| 0:13.6 | thought we'd revisit the question of how deadly the disease is. |
| 0:18.7 | The mortality rate… |
| 0:19.8 | The mortality rate for the virus… |
| 0:21.6 | The death rate was remarkably high. |
| 0:25.4 | Reporters like to throw around the words death rate, but it turns out that the phrase |
| 0:29.6 | can mean very different things. |
| 0:32.0 | People aren't always clear what they're talking about and it makes a huge difference. |
| 0:36.2 | There's the crude mortality rate. |
| 0:38.4 | That's simply what percentage of the population have died. |
| 0:42.0 | You can have a disease that's 100% fatal, but if not many people catch it, the crude |
| 0:46.4 | mortality rate will be low. |
| 0:49.0 | Then there's the case for mortality rate. |
| 0:51.0 | That's why you take all the confirmed deaths and all the confirmed cases and work out |
| 0:55.8 | how many deaths there are per, say, 100 cases. |
| 0:59.2 | That's a bit like the old joke about looking for the keys under the lamppost because that's |
| 1:03.6 | where the light is. |
| 1:05.1 | The case for mortality rate is easy to calculate. |
| 1:08.0 | Just divide one easily accessible number by another, but it could be quite misleading. |
| 1:13.4 | Lots of people have had coronavirus infections without being tested. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.