Helen MacDonald

I don't think the public would be very impressed with that if that's the attitude that people are taking.

Yes, I did.

I had a chat with an EBM giant.

I'm going to describe him as earlier in the week.

I had a talk with Professor John Ioannidis about his concerns around the quality of data that's being collected, particularly mortality data around COVID-19.

And concerns about how, well, how a low quality of mortality data really means that we have so much uncertainty in some of these modeling studies that are going on.

which is so key to the policies and decisions that governments are now taking to physically distance us from each other or close schools or these types of interventions.

Having listened to this, from an epidemiological point of view, there are a few terms in there which people might not be familiar with around the kind of case fatality and infection fatality.

And Carl, you explained this really well to me the other day.

And will you do it for listeners now?

The message that I kind of got from John from that is that if we got a genuine population sample in one or maybe a handful of locations and tested 10,000 people, I guess we'd need a kind of serology test rather than the molecular ones that are going on at the moment to test whether you have the virus.

We want to be testing for whether you have had the virus.

Do you think that would solve a lot of the problems that we're seeing with policy now?

How do you differentiate someone that actually died and that was the major thing as opposed to someone that's quite crumbly and frail and there's other stuff going on and this is sort of something that just...

incredibly challenging times all round and people are doing an amazing job and I know Helen's one of them because she's stuck at home her husband's out at GP land and you're in isolation as well we're all in isolation he's in GP land but virtually from his computer we're doing a we're doing tag team sort of mini three-hour shifts uh shift shift on work and then shift on the kids so yeah they're they're in the paddling pool at the moment so apologies if you get some of the uh the noise from that

Goodbye from me.

I'm Helen MacDonald.

I'm the UK research editor for the BMDA and arresting GP.

Yeah, I have.

I think it suits me well.