Duncan

Welcome back to Talk Evidence, your weekly look at the evidence around coronavirus.

Last week we focused very much on the ONS death data in the UK and we'll be getting a little update on that, but this week we are going to be looking a bit more broadly at ethics and generally at waste and research.

As always, I'm joined by our two favourite EBM nerds, Helen MacDonald, Resting GP and UK Research Editor for the BMJ.

Hello, Helen.

And Carl Hennigan, GP, Professor at Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of BMJ EBM.

Hi, Carl.

As always, Carl, you've had another busy week and we saw you are

talking to national media on Newsnight with David Spiegelhalter, who was our guest last week, talking a little bit about that ONS data.

Now, David last week suggested that he thought there was going to be another peak because of the way that data is collected.

Did we see some of that?

So these raise important questions, I suppose, about the natural history of COVID, and we'll be wanting to pick that up in another episode, I think.

One question that David, or three things that David thought might be suggesting some of the excess deaths there that didn't have a direct COVID-related line on the death certificate were,

because there were, we'd had a mild winter, and there were a lot of frail elderly people, we might have expected to die from flu or whatever else in that period, who didn't.

The fact that there might be, you know, reluctance to diagnose COVID, if that wasn't absolutely the obvious cause of death.

And then finally, because there are these people who might not be going into hospital, even though they needed to.

Did any of that become more clear?

And you spoke about that last week, and I'm sure this is a topic we're going to be coming back to.

Great.

Well, there is a quick update on that data for you.

So in talk evidence, we usually have some start stops.