Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones and today I'm talking to Rupert Bill, who's a clinician scientist group leader at the Francis Crick Institute.

Rupert's written in the latest issue of the LRB about the novel coronavirus. And we're talking on the phone rather than together in the studio or on Skype because I'm under quarantine in Italy at the moment. And Rupert, you also are not at work today. Is that right?

That's right. I've got a mild upper respiratory tract infection.

I suspect not the novel coronavirus for various reasons,

but one has to be cautious about these things.

I'd like to begin, if I may, by reading a few sentences from your piece.

These are probably the three most alarming sentences in it, but let's begin with them anyway.

In countries where rapid testing and isolation do not happen, the disease will at its peak

rapidly overwhelm the ability of hospitals to cope, and the case fatality rates will be much higher.

The global case fatality rate is above 3% at the moment, and if, reasonable worst-case scenario,

30 to 70% of the 7.8 billion people on earth are infected. That means between 70 and 165 million deaths.

It would be the worst disaster in human history in terms of total lives lost.

Now, you wrote that a week ago. It's now, we're recording on the afternoon of Thursday,

the 12th of March. Are you feeling more or less optimistic about our chances of avoiding

100 million deaths? Well, I think I very carefully caveated that in the sentence

immediately after by suggesting that everybody expects that people will comply with

reasonable public health measures put in by competence authorities. So I don't think anyone's quite expecting it to be on that scale. And

there are reasons to believe that we are likely to get on top of this virus at some point

in the future. So I don't personally expect it to be that bad. It's important to have a sense of the scale of it,

because if everyone really did operate on a business-as-usual basis,

then I think that would be a reasonable expectation

about the global burden of deaths over time.

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