Carl Heneghan

Making a diagnosis used to be a well understood and practised procedure: take a history from someone presenting with symptoms, examine them and do some tests to arrive at an overall diagnosis. It requires substantial training and experience to put this into practice. William Osler, known as one of the founders of modern medicine, often

Daniel Kahneman called it anchoring; I call it tunnel vision. It’s when we depend too heavily on our pre-existing ideas and first pieces of information – the anchor – to inform our judgments. How a problem is perceived, how it is described, how it makes us feel alongside our individual experience and expertise shapes the

The government has restricted the movements of millions of people in England because Covid is apparently on the rise. But what happens when you start digging into the data? I have used two datasets to piece together the number of tests, cases and results for Pillar 1 tests (which are done in healthcare settings) and

Test, test, test said the WHO. And globally, that’s what everyone did: tests have detected more than 14 million cases of Sars-CoV-2 so far. The thinking goes: turn up, have your test, and if positive, you must have the disease. But that’s far from the truth. When virus levels in the population are very low,

There are plenty of mysteries about how coronavirus spread around the world so quickly. But could we shed some light on this by looking in an unusual place? Several studies have been doing just that: tracing the emergence of covid-19 by investigating frozen faeces samples from sewage. This analysis cannot tell us where the virus

Can antivirals help us defeat coronavirus? The odds don’t look good. The use of antiviral compounds against respiratory viruses has a chequered history. Hundreds have been tested; very few have made it to market. And even fewer make a difference. What’s more, the evidence of their impact on mortality rates – the most important outcome

The coronavirus data from across the capital – which shows that the numbers are coming down – is highly reassuring.  On 15 May, there were just 56 people with newly diagnosed cases of Covid. And at least six London trusts are reporting no deaths in hospitals in the last 48 hours. Across the country, about 30 per cent of

Could the future of pandemic planning lie in our past? A century ago, there were hundreds of so-called ‘fever hospitals’ dotted across Britain. These small institutions were built for diseases of a bygone age – smallpox, scarlet fever and typhus – but were designed for precisely the same problems we face today.  They contained isolation wards, separate accommodation for