Carl Hennigan

I've said this for a long time.

I mean, you look at the tech companies.

I mean, Amazon doesn't say, okay, let's collect data for three years.

We'll send it to a crack unit at Oxford and ask them to work on it for a year, produce a few papers, and we'll have some journal clubs and spread it throughout Amazon to learn how to serve customers better.

i mean they they i mean that's absurd right but but that's what we do in medicine i mean instead of saying every single data point that comes in needs to serve to make us better at predicting risk better understanding uh outcomes oh we're steers roebuck i mean you know we're marks and spencer you know we're we've been doing it this way for a long time

and you know we know how to set up a bunch of shirts on the front end and we know how to sell them and you know we're puzzled by this internet thing and figures it'll be a fad and go away i mean the whole medical research complex is inadequate to keep up with the information needs in ordinary time so alone in a pandemic time

And it's time for us to flip the switch on our mental models about how we should be working together, what we should be doing to produce knowledge, and the kind of knowledge that we need in order to help frontline clinicians and patients to make the right choices for themselves, given levels of uncertainty.

And it's just that we've been locked in a paradigm for such a long time that it's hard to imagine it differently.

But that's where something like this, a crisis like this, almost forces a reset.

Welcome back to your Now Weekly Talk Evidence, the show where we bring you a roundup of what's going on in the world of COVID and our understanding of it.

Today we're going to be looking at diagnostic tests again and the fact that there are so many of them out there, the way in which we're debating the evidence on COVID and how we do some decision making.

As always, joining us are Helen MacDonald, resting GP and UK research editor for the BMJ.

Hi, Helen.

And Carl Hennigan, professor of epidemiological medicine at Oxford, editor of BMJ's EBM journal, and also a GP.

Hi, Carl.

Carl, last week we got you to give us a very quick update on data from England and Wales about the mortality rate at the moment.

And this week there has been yet another update on that.

Could you give us a very quick summary of what's been going on?

and get nice to separate out what makes a difference and then there's going to be a catch-up phase isn't there so there we go we're sort of shoehorning a stop into this or a start as always you can look at it either way uh start taking the time to to really look at what we do

Helen, before we started this, we were having a chat and you've been looking at something that's interesting.