Helen MacDonald

And to what extent is that normal?

And I decided to call upon Harlan Krumholtz, cardiologist at Yale, and talk with him a bit about natural history because I had been tipped off that he had thoughts on it.

So I wasn't sure that I really had a clear picture after speaking to Harlan, except that he was quite clean on technology potentially as a solution.

And there's been growing interest, particularly in symptom tracker apps, I think.

And here, I guess the idea is that you're not relying on health systems collecting information at all.

You're directly relying on patients and the public collecting information.

going one step back and taking you into their homes.

And the largest study I'm aware of or project that's being run on this is out of London by a team, including Tim Spector.

And I spotted an article published yesterday in Science, 5th of May.

And their team appeared to plan to track risk factors, herald symptoms, clinical outcomes and geographical hotspots.

And whilst this seemed interesting, it seemed more of a public health tool

than it did something that would help a jobbing clinician really understand the natural history.

Carl, I want to come back to you.

Firstly, to ask if you caught that paper in science and also just have your reflections on these two things, this kind of idea of real-time recording of symptoms and signs from clinical practice and what that might help us with.

And this use of apps in research, is that something you've got any experience of or...

might be able to share insights on.

But how do we connect the dots?

Is it that we're missing infrastructure or are we missing the kind of protocols to do it?

Is it a coordination problem?

So this would be a good way to speak to the public about this problem, because the public are very interested in the fact that we don't know a lot about COVID at the moment.