Helen MacDonald

I think you should tell us about that.

And goodbye from me.

Sure, I'm Helen MacDonald.

I'm the UK Research Editor at the BMJ.

I want to hear from Carl on primary care and pneumonia, because that really fascinated me.

And how do you detect that from acute respiratory distress, which you might be seeing from COVID?

Well, I was thinking bigger picture this week.

I was looking around thinking about this podcast and things to start and stop.

And what I'm most struck by is really the volume of information coming out from people and different organizations on COVID-19.

We've got research coming out.

We've got evidence summaries.

There's sort of information ranging from informal advice, sort of expert opinion on matters to local and to national or international guidance.

And the thing that got me thinking about it was actually a couple of weeks ago when there was the case of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories being recommended against in COVID-19.

And that really got me thinking about the kind of appetite for information that's out there on COVID, particularly amongst patients in the public as well.

how it cascades through the media and social media really quickly and how it can be very confusing, even including fake information out there, particularly when there's a lot of uncertainty.

It's really made me think more about the efficiency and transparency and trust issues involved in making guidance in a crisis.

So

I think for efficiency, what we saw with the non-steroidal anti-inflammatories was that within hours, there was loads of guidance out there.

It sort of seemed to explode, create this work explosion with everyone commenting or coming back with counter guidance.

And I thought there must be better ways we can identify when issues are important to many people.