Carl Hennigan

Hi, I'm Carl Hennigan.

I am Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of BMJ EBM.

Yeah, we've been pulling together a lot of evidence, particularly for primary care and in the community.

There's huge uncertainties and trying to bring evidence from other areas in acute respiratory infections.

And that's really difficult to do when you're saying COVID is brand new and trying to provide good advice about how to treat people in the community.

huge uncertainties and huge evidence-based questions that need to be answered and i think we'll come out of this with a sense of a need to re-look at how evidence is developed how it's particularly kept up to date and how it's disseminated to the front line and i think we're going to require some rethink of where we're at and what we're doing

Well, I think first is to say when people say this is a new virus or a new emerging infection, I think you'd still have to pause there and say it's not 100 percent certain.

I want you to just think since 1970, we've discovered about 1500 pathogens.

of which 70% of them come from animals.

Some people are well aware of some, like Ebola, HIV, but they're not aware of many circulating diseases that have been discovered, like metanemovirus, that give rise to viral infections and viral pneumonia.

So our real ability of what I call influenza-like illness and what's going on is actually pretty primitive.

But what we do know is these viruses are all around us, circulating all the time.

And then at some point they emerge into an epidemic or in sometimes a pandemic.

We're more understanding about what happens with influenza.

but less uncertain about SARS, because we've only had one episode really before in 2003.

We've had the Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome virus, and now we've got this big outbreak.

And I assume this will kick off a large piece of work, particularly about the ecology.

How do we interact?

How do we live with these viruses?

And what's the best way to treat them?