For the next few months Talk Evidence is going to focus on the new corona virus pandemic.

There is an enormous amount of uncertainty about the disease, what the symptoms are, fatality rate, treatment options, things we shouldn't be doing.

We're going to try to get away from the headlines and talk about what we need to know - to hopefully give you some insight into these issues.

This week

5.00 - Carl gives us an update about pneumonia in primary care, should you give antibiotics when you're not sure if it's bacterial or viral

10.00 - The importance and difficulty of making guidelines now

15.00 - We hear from guideline maker Per Vandvik, about making guidance.

21.40 - Preprint servers for medicine are showing their use in this fast changing situation. Joseph Ross from Yale School of Medicine, and one of The BMJ's research editors, talks to us about the kind of information we're seeing on medRxiv.

31.10 - Testing. What are the tests, and when do we want specificity, and when do we want sensitivity. Nick Beeching from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine joins us to explain.

Reading list:
www.bmj.com/coronavirus

Rapidly managing pneumonia in older people during a pandemic
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/rapidly-managing-pneumonia-in-older-people-during-a-pandemic/

https://www.medrxiv.org/

Covid-19: testing times
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1403