Helen MacDonald

And so what we're seeing in the ONS data this week, you've been seeing in some other data a little bit earlier in the daily hospital data.

Is this difficulty with the case fatality rate, is this a COVID specific problem or does this crop up in any pandemic or with any infection?

I mean, could it be something that's sort of fixed to say we need to almost redefine or be more specific about what we mean about case fatality in order for it to actually be useful to decision makers or clinicians?

And it's interesting you should say that because there was that interesting correspondence in the New England Journal this week on universal screening for SARS-CoV-2 in women admitted for delivery.

And that similarly, it's obviously a slightly more specific population, but they RNA tested all of those women presenting for delivery and found asymptomatic infection in about 13 to 14% of people and symptomatic infection in about 2% of people.

which again suggests that quite a few people out there are having the infection.

After our discussion earlier, Carl, I think the other interesting thing to speak to David's point about how do we drill down and understand these excess deaths further was knowing that the ONS have some additional data, both on the ages of people who are dying and also on the causes of death in those people.

What have you found?

Hi, I'm Helen MacDonald, UK Research Editor at the BMJ.

With a very relaxing voice.

Thank you.

I have, and I think my headline message is don't get your hopes up about these drugs.

As you said, there's been lots of enthusiasm, and I think that's probably all we need to say on that.

So we really wanted to try and get behind the hype, would it be fair to call it hype?

I called a long-term friend of the BMJ, clinical pharmacologist Robin Ferner in Birmingham, who is in isolation like us all, but together with Jeff Aronson.

at the University of Oxford, they have been looking into the evidence for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in COVID-19.

Yes, I think there were two things that I thought about after I spoke to Robin.

One was just around the general politicization and hype around some of these drugs and potentially the harm that that might cause for people who might take either of these medications for other reasons and the impact on the availability of those medicines for those populations of people.

Carl, what did you think?

It was disappointing to hear from Robin how many of the studies that he and Jeff found on the register looked like they would generate perhaps poor quality evidence, small studies that were not going to give us a very clear answer.