Duncan Jarvis

Welcome back to your now weekly talk, Evidence, which we're recording on a beautiful sunny afternoon on Wednesday the 15th of April.

As always, in this new world of coronavirus, we're focusing on that.

Last week, we talked about hydroxychloroquine as a potential therapeutic, prognostic models and face masks.

Today, we're going to talk about remdesivir, another potential therapeutic, smoking, care homes, and what the latest data on mortality is in the UK.

I'm Duncan Jarvis, multimedia editor here at the BMJ, and as always, I'm joined by our two favourite EBM nerds, Helen MacDonald and Carl Hannigan.

Helen, can I get you to introduce yourself?

So as it's been such glorious sunny weather here, it got me thinking, Carl, is there any evidence yet that warmer weather is having the effect that we hope that it might reduce coronaviruses spread?

So fingers crossed there.

And I suppose we might see that in a few weeks time when the numbers come in then.

And that takes us on to what we're talking about later on about the latest figures on death.

But before that, it's time to look at what to start and what to stop.

So last week, we looked at hydroxychloroquine as a potential antiviral agent.

Now, one of the other ones that has been tested, and there was a new paper of slightly dubious quality in the NEJM, looking at remdesivir.

And Helen, you've been reading about this.

Yeah, definitely.

And especially interesting given that hydroxychloroquine is a fairly old drug.

It's been around for a long time.

So you would expect, you know, there is a generic version of it.

But this one is a pretty new drug.

It was developed for Ebola.