professor kenneth rogoff, thank you for your time. thank you and sorry to deliver this message!ing on. a senior white house health adviser has expressed optimism that an existing antiviral drug could help fight the coronavirus. dr anthony fauci said data from a clinical trial of remdesivir showed it could reduce the recovery time in sufferers and that the drug showed great promise. the data shows that it has a clear—cut positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery. this is really quite important for a number of reasons, and i will give you the data. it is highly significant. if you look at the time to recovery being shorter in the remdesivir group, ii days compared to 15, and that isa days compared to 15, and that is a value for the scientists who are listening of 0.001. that is something that, although 31% improvement does not seem like a knockout 100% but it is proof of concept because what it has proven is that a drug can block the virus. 0ur health correspondent, james gallagher, explains the history of the drug. it is been developed by a pharmaceutical company called

earlier, i spoke to kenneth rogoff, professor of public policy and professor of economics at harvardonomy has been hit. this is just the cusp of it. we are in the middle of the deepest dive in unemployment, in ouput, maybe in 150 years, and we may come out of it faster, i hope so. but, otherwise, these are headed for great depression—type numbers, at least in the short—term. and reading about what you have been writing about this, i think you feel that central banks, including the fed, have made a historic mistake in dealing with all of this? well, not an immediate mistake in the sense that they didn't leave themselves with other tools so they are stuck guaranteeing all the credit in the economy. i wish that over the past couple of years they had thought how to do effective negative interest—rate policy, which is a more market—based mechanism. now the fed isjust guaranteeing vast swathes of credit in the economy, corporate debt, municipal debt, and if this does not end soon and i don't know if it will, they will have quite a mess to clean up. it would be better to have lower interest