Helen MacDonald

And this was a little bit longer than in respiratory samples, which was about 18 days and in serum samples, which was about 16 days.

They also found that there was a difference according to the severity.

So in the respiratory samples, people with severe disease had evidence for around 21 days, whereas in mild disease, it was more like 14 days.

They also found that virus duration was longer in people who were older than 60 and in male patients.

So one thing that we don't know from this study is whether those people who are shedding viruses in those secretions, whether those secretions are infective or whether the virus is just in there, I guess, as a kind of dead item.

I don't know enough about the biology to comment on that.

But yeah, there you are, a little update.

How do you test for that, Carl?

Can you tell the difference in the RNA?

we'll get somebody on next week to help me with that because it's outside of my comfort zone sure you can the other thing which people might be interested to take a look at we've talked a bit about the pharmacologic treatments for coronavirus disease we talked about hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine a couple of weeks ago and we talked about remdesivir last week and there is a nice review summary paper in the journal of the american medical association jammer

which was published a few days ago, actually back on April the 13th, called Pharmacologic Treatments for Coronavirus Disease 2019.

And if you're interested in just having an overview of all of the things being trialled and where the evidence is at the moment, that can provide you with some information.

I did.

Well, we're so keenly awaiting evidence on a whole host of COVID-19 prediction and prevention and treatment strategies that

And Carl and I and some of our guests have expressed some concerns about the quality of evidence that we're seeing coming through around its coordination, its quality or its planning.

And it really raises the issue of to what extent we could be wasting time and research.

And COVID aside, we know that we do have a big problem with waste and research.

And I wanted to speak with Professor Paul Glazu about this further.

And Paul's the director of the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare at Bond University in Australia.

And around 10 years ago, he, with others, estimated that around 85% of the research that we do is wasted, which is quite a horrifying figure.