Helen MacDonald

And interestingly, when I was talking to Joseph, one of the points that he made was that preprints were really designed for the scientific community.

And I guess what we're seeing in a pandemic is for a tendency for those who are perhaps a little bit further downstream to suddenly be in contact with this evidence, which has been sort of quietly there for scientists, but is now being pulled out and perhaps thrust a bit too close to decision making.

I think if they do interest you, the other thing which you can have a look at on bmj.com, which is quite interesting, is one of our all-time favorite authors, Dr. Richard Lehman is back, not writing his weekly journal blog, but writing us a weekly pre-print COVID-19 blog.

So if you want somebody who does have some of that expertise to filter the pre-prints for you, keep your eye on what Richard has to say or follow him on Twitter.

Yes, maybe we should get him on to give us the highlights.

Oh, I see where you're going with this, Duncan.

So I think this has been the big thing of this week.

And the questions that I've seen floating around are, have we got enough tests?

Have we got the right tests?

Are we testing the right people?

And I thought this would be a perfect opportunity for us to try and cut through some of this hype.

So what I've done is I've curated the easy information.

So broadly, we've got these two types of tests.

We've got these molecular tests, which are telling you if you have the disease.

You remember from the kind of press conferences that health ministers have been doing, they keep stressing the have.

And then we have these antibody tests, which are looking for immunoglobulin G and M, so IgG and IgM.

And these are going to tell us if we have had the disease.

And some of these are done in labs and there's some other tests being developed for use at point of care.

So broadly speaking, we've got this molecular test and then we've got these antibody tests that are developing to tell you if you have the infection now or if you have had the infection in the past.

Tell us what we know at the moment about how good these tests are in terms of their performance.