Paul Glaziou

A lot of groups are trying to coordinate things, but because there's no central body to coordinate research, people have often been putting out feelers to try and work out where that's going on.

And it's been tricky.

So WHO has been trying to do that for the vaccine trials, which are probably the most important trials we're going to be doing.

And they have suggested there'd be a coordination of the international effort so that there was effectively one control arm with all of the different vaccine arms.

I think that sort of coordination would be a very good idea.

And it's clearly a role that WHO could potentially play across the board.

But of course, they've got a lot of other things on their plate as well.

And so it could be the research funders instead who get together.

One of the things that we've found very striking in looking through clinicaltrials.gov and other registries of what research is going on is there has been a fantastic number of trials of treatments started up and underway.

The trials of vaccines are going along at breathtaking speed.

So we've now got half a dozen that are now in there, at least phase one human type trials going on, which is just astonishing.

But

What we've failed to do from looking at the trials registries is to do the trials on improving what we're doing at the moment that's working.

We don't have many things that are effective.

We've got basically different types of social distancing, for example, and the hand hygiene and perhaps masks.

That's still a great uncertainty.

There are some other things that we could be looking at, like

ventilation within rooms or even some interesting stuff about copper surfacing, for example.

You might have seen the report that showed that coronavirus will live for several days on hard surfaces like steel or plastic.

But if you copper coat the surface, it will only live for minutes or hours at best.