Helen MacDonald

I'm sure Duncan will put the link at the end.

Goodbye from me.

Yes, I'm Helen MacDonald, the UK research editor for the BMJ.

I think I'm most interested in just thinking about having a totally blank page that we really knew nothing about this virus, about how it transmits, about what symptoms people have, about how to prevent it, about how to treat it.

It seems like we didn't know anything a couple of months ago.

And I'd be really interested to hear from an infectious disease epidemiologist about how you begin to piece together all of these emerging pieces of evidence into a picture.

I think it's interesting to think of the kind of symptom footprint, isn't it?

If you are a GP, perhaps sitting in your surgery and you might get somebody walk in with some of these milder symptoms, presumably to begin with, how you might begin differentiating that from another sort of short lived symptom.

normal viral illness and something which I have noticed when people have been describing the symptoms has been fever and cough and they seem to have talked less about nasal symptoms and that made me think a bit like you have in your mind when you see people with a sore throat and you're trying to work out whether it might be a bacterial infection and you look for the absence of a cough almost I wondered here whether there's any information emerging from the case reports that

in NEJM or in some of the other case theories around how you might untangle this infection from another.

So the fever might not even be at the start.

I think it's quite interesting speaking as someone who has small children in my house.

I think I would find it quite hard to wear a mask when you're sort of getting up in the night or dosing someone with medication or just giving them a cuddle.

But it does give me a bit of hope that study because it did suggest that the masks, and I don't know what particular type it was, did work.

And I wonder if...

people's attitudes to wearing a mask if they were out in public for example where they weren't having to be a sort of primary caregiver for someone who's infected who needs help and support might be a bit different.

And then combined... What's frequent hand washing then, Carl?

Well, that was a weak recommendation for it.

And I think probably experts have got to tailor their advice, haven't they?

And that evidence, which Carl and I guess pointed out, probably mean that perhaps it's less suitable there.