Summary
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, puts the risks of Covid-19 into perspective. He found that the proportion of people who get infected by coronavirus, who then go on to die increases with age, and the trend matches almost exactly how our background mortality risk also goes up. Catching the disease could be like packing a year’s worth of risk into a couple of weeks.
(Mathematician and Risk guru, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter at the University of Cambridge. Credit: In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to another home school edition of Morales on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:05.6 | This week the UK went into the kind of virus-induced lockdown that many other countries have already |
| 0:11.4 | experienced, or quite likely, will experience soon. |
| 0:16.6 | Royal listener Henry has emailed Morales at BBC.co.uk to say, |
| 0:22.8 | I would love to hear from one of my heroes, David Speagle-Holter, on the topic of risk |
| 0:27.9 | in the context of Covid. I think there is much to reassure us and common sense to impart. |
| 0:34.2 | Henry, your wish is our command. I spoke to David Speagle-Holter, the chair of the |
| 0:39.5 | Winton Centre for Evidence and Risk Communication at Cambridge University on Monday. |
| 0:45.2 | He's been taking a close look at the data being used by the Imperial College London |
| 0:49.4 | team who've been modelling the disease and advising the government. |
| 0:53.7 | The numbers show that the proportion of people who get infected, who go on to die, increases |
| 0:58.8 | with age. And David noticed that the trend matches almost exactly how our background |
| 1:04.8 | mortality risk increases sharply with age. He plotted both lines on a graph and could |
| 1:10.5 | scarcely believe what he saw. |
| 1:12.8 | I was amazed. They go right along the same curve. |
| 1:16.6 | So what I understand you're saying is that if you can track coronavirus, you've got |
| 1:21.1 | the same risk of dying over the next couple of weeks as you would normally have of dying |
| 1:27.6 | over the next year, no matter what your age is. |
| 1:30.7 | Yes, very roughly. And also, actually, not just your age, but also your background health, |
| 1:36.8 | because most of the deaths each year in normal life are from people who are already chronically |
| 1:42.1 | ill. And similarly for coronavirus, that we know we hear that the people who die often |
| 1:46.8 | who almost always have some accompanying health problems and hold out the risks for very |
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