Helen MacDonald

Additional cleaning, for example?

Could you consider using distancing or masks and even simple things like opening the windows to try and increase the ventilation through your property?

I thought that was quite a nice consider starting, particularly as we perhaps look towards the future and what comes next away from the focus on hospitals.

Yes, this is something that's been puzzling me for a while.

As you know, I am a big fan of talking and also listening to other people's stories.

And I think one of the things that's really invaluable in clinical practice is hearing people's stories of how their illness has unfolded from their perspective.

So the symptoms and signs they had first, what might have developed in the middle and how they evolved or resolved or didn't.

So that's following the natural history of the disease.

And natural history patterns are really important for diagnosis and for setting expectations and creating safety nets for patients.

And we've talked about a wide range of symptoms on this show and blood results and risk factors.

And a lot of that evidence come from large case series.

And most of it has allowed us to understand that this can be a multi-system disease, but the information in a way has been quite flat.

So typically it's been about what people have had when they were admitted to hospital for some reason, and then what happened to them right at the end and little about the bits in between or the bits at the beginning.

We also know that those data are limited by the amount of testing that's been going on and a poor description of the populations that they came from, particularly lacking a denominator.

And I've not been aware of that much longitudinal information that's come out on symptoms and signs and results.

And some of the questions I think that clinicians have, which are unanswered, relate to these things.

So I've heard from primary care people asking things like, is a fever on week three of COVID or presumptive COVID okay?

Is it true that there are different kind of stereotypes of COVID presentation?

There have been concerns from secondary care around whether the type of respiratory pattern that has developed in COVID patients is typical or not.

And then now we're starting to see people recovering from COVID and finding that they have ongoing bothersome symptoms.