Helen MacDonald

And to think that there could be sort of waste going on at a time when people are very busy.

Yeah, we talked back, I think, in our first COVID podcast, which I think was in February, about the blank canvas of evidence that we currently had on the virus and the illness COVID-19.

And a lot of information has now been thrown at that canvas very quickly.

And we've talked quite a bit about descriptive papers and, for example, case series that have come out looking at people with varying severity of COVID-19 and looking back to describe their characteristics.

And we've learned things like more severe cases have been older people, have been men.

in people with cardiac disease, but we haven't discussed much looking forwards and seen sort of prognostic research where you might look at a variable or risk factor and assess the influence of that on the outcome.

And that would seem to be useful to those who might need to be making policies around how to offer escalation of care into hospital or into intensive care units, particularly when resources are scarce.

So the research team were really interested to get this fast track paper in

which was a systematic review and critical appraisal of prediction models for diagnosis and prognosis in COVID-19.

And a few days ago, I spoke with Laura Weintz and Martin Van Smaeden, two of its key authors.

So let's hear from them.

So one thing that we've asked Laura and Martin to do is to keep updating this systematic review for us.

And one of the things I wanted to talk a little bit about is innovation in journals.

Journals feel like a bit of a stuffy old place at times.

But we've been increasingly thinking about how we can make the evidence that we publish a little bit more live.

I don't know yet that we're going to be able to create this as a living systematic review, but we're going to give it a go.

There's quite a few technical challenges, but we're going to work on it over the coming weeks and months.

And maybe we'll come back to Laura and Martin and hear if there is any success in terms of creating some models or spotting some new ones out there.

You're starting this, Carl, are you?

Well, being quite radical this week...