Big data is being crunched to help us tackle some of the enormous amount of uncertainty about covid-19, what the symptoms are, fatality rate, treatment options, things we shouldn't be doing.

In these podcasts, 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.

(3.10) Calum Semple, professor of outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool talks about the ISARIC project - predesigned research brought off the shelf and deployed during a pandemic.

(14.20) Ben Goldacre, doctor, researcher and director of the EBM datalab at the University of Oxford, joins us to talk about how his team have managed to pull together records from 40% of NHS patients to look for patterns in covid-19 morbidity and mortality.

Reading list

OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19-related hospital death in the linked electronic health records of 17 million adult NHS patients.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1

Features of 16,749 hospitalised UK patients with COVID-19 using the ISARIC WHO Clinical Characterisation Protocol
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.20076042v1