Carl Hennigan

You might hear some birds in the background if you listen very carefully.

And I am also editor-in-chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.

Well, one of the things is when it started to emerge, and particularly the guidance changed not only in the UK, around the world, we started to realise that there were a significant number of questions

that were coming at us all at once for contextualised evidence about things like face masks, to drugs, to what about steroids, what about treatment of pneumonia in community hospitals.

And what we did is put together our team at the centre, but a huge number of people who've joined us to start producing rapid evidence reviews, trying to answer some of the questions that can help clinicians on the ground, particularly in this first few weeks, facilitate decision-making.

Because what's really important here is that actually everybody doesn't panic.

And there are issues here which are having to made up on the hoof, like how do you examine somebody when you've only got a few minutes because they're overwhelmed?

How do you minimally examine people without actually touching the patient?

So there are loads of things you need to do differently.

And we're trying to help produce some of the evidence to help them decisions.

Yeah, look, I mean, it's very interesting.

I think there's sort of been a hone down on just two symptoms, hasn't there?

Fever and cough.

And if you've got fever and cough, you've got potentially COVID and you should be tested.

And if you haven't got them, you don't require testing because you might have something else.

That is being shown by the evidence emerging to be incorrect.

The first thing is to say, if you look at the Diamond cruise ship and there was a piece in the BMJ which looked at the village in Italy who tested all the people in the village, that actually half the people in this outbreak will be asymptomatic.

They just won't know they've had it.

So they may feel a bit unwell.

They might feel a little bit hot, but they just would not present normally saying I've got symptoms.