Helen MacDonald

Hi, Duncan.

I have.

We've had a lot of drugs in our list and I wanted us to spread our wings and look at other things.

There was an interesting analysis article published on the BMJ today, 6th of May, asking for simple measures to reduce the spread and severity of infection among household contacts of COVID-19.

And it's written by a primary care academic, Paul Little from Southampton and colleagues.

And I picked it out because I think there's growing momentum behind the idea that we have to pay close attention to what's going on in the community now, because that's where most of the infection is.

So the argument, and this is a debate paper, so it's making an argument rather than giving us research.

What it's saying is we basically want to try and reduce COVID.

Most people with COVID are at home, so it makes sense to focus there.

And a lot of them live with other people.

We've got evidence that healthcare workers have higher rates of infection.

And we think that's because they have a lot of contact with people who have COVID and they take in bigger doses regularly.

of infecting virus because they're close physically close to people with infection and the same therefore may well be true of people who live with people with COVID healthcare workers need PPE protection to try and reduce infection to themselves but

Those kind of measures aren't practical for household contacts.

So this paper is looking at what are the alternatives.

We don't have a lot of good evidence to say clearly what people should do and people's circumstances in their household vary enormously.

But what they're suggesting is if we use the precautionary principle of

Are there simple things that people could think of themselves to try and protect their family members?

So thinking about within your circumstances, how might you isolate the infected household member insofar as you can?

Are there infection control measures that you could take?