In this episode of Talk Evidence, we'll be finding out if second waves are inevitable (or even a thing), how the UK's failure to protect it's care homes is symbolic of a neglected part of public life, and why those papers on hydroxychloroquine were retracted.

This is Talk Evidence - the podcast for evidence based medicine, where research, guidance and practice are debated and demystified.

Helen Macdonald, UK research editor for The BMJ, and Carl Heneghan, professor of EBM at the University of Oxford and editor of BMJ EBM, talk about some of the latest developments in the world of evidence, and what they mean.

This week:

2.00 - Helen looking into a second wave - and finds out from Tom Jefferson, an epidemiologist with the Cochrane Collaboration's acute respiratory infections group, that a "wave" might be a misnomer.

12.00 - Mary Daly, professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Oxford, tells us where the UK went wrong with care homes, and what we’d need to do to stop it happening again.

31.20 - Carl and Helen discuss those hydroxy chloroquine papers, now retracted. This was recorded before that happened, but we decided to keep this section in, because they talk about the reasons the papers should be viewed with caution, and the importance of scrutiny of the data.

Reading list:
The talk from Mary Daly at Green Templeton College.
https://www.gtc.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/event/covid-19-and-care-homes-what-went-wrong-and-why/