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There are a number of complications following infection with Covid-19 that doctors are continuing to find in hospitals. One of the most significant is an acute kidney injury or AKI which can come alongside the disease and NICE has just published rapid guidance to help healthcare staff on the Covid frontline who are not kidney specialists. Inside Health’s Erika Wright has been following staff at Southampton General Hospital during the coronavirus outbreak and meets Kirsty Armstrong, Clinical Lead for Renal Services, to discuss managing kidneys and Covid. Could injecting blood donated from a patient who has recovered from Covid 19 into someone who is ill help the recipient recover too? It’s a potentially viable treatment with a long history, known as convalescent plasma therapy, and trials of this technique against Covid are beginning around the world. We hear from Jeff Henderson, Professor of Medicine at Washington University in St Louis, on progress in the world’s largest trial of this passive immunisation against the virus in the US, and from James Gill, Honorary Clinical Lecturer at Warwick Medical School, who’s been following the latest game-changing refinement of this therapy.Just as the rest of us have been getting better at zoom meetings and remembering to unmute ourselves when we want to speak, so have GPs who are now getting rather good at having online consultations. Will this change the way we “go to the doctor” forever or is there sometimes no substitute for face to face contact? Dr Margaret McCartney gives a GP’s insights.As more people begin to wear face masks what kind of impact does it have on communication when a person’s mouth is covered up and it’s hard to tell whether someone is happy or cross? Claudia discusses this question with George Hu, a clinical psychologist in Shanghai where masks have now become ubiquitous, and Alexander Todorov, Professor of Psychology at Princeton University and author of the book “Face Value : The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions”. Are we more versatile in interpreting a masked person’s mood or intentions than we think?Producer: Adrian Washbourne

Evidence from China, Italy, the USA and now the UK shows categorically that people with diabetes can get seriously ill if they're infected with the new coronavirus. Researchers are trying to untangle the risks for Type 1 and Type 2 but so far, diabetes isn't included in the government's high risk patient group. NHS England's National Specialty Advisor, Professor Partha Kar, tells Claudia Hammond that he believes an individual risk calculator which will enable people to work out their own risk, and so shield themselves accordingly, will be the best way forwards. In the meantime, Dr Kar says, glucose control is essential and people should check their ketone levels as soon as they start to feel unwell. BBC Radio Science Unit producer Beth and her husband Andy (who has Type 1 diabetes) describe to Claudia their experience of Andy getting very ill with Covid-19. They discovered ketone levels appeared at much lower blood glucose levels than normal, something that Dr Kar says appears to be a feature of Covid-19 infection.Erika Wright is back at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust. Clinical lead and consultant in critical care, Dr Sanjay Gupta, talks about success giving critically ill patients oxygen using non-invasive ventilation: CPAP - continuous positive airway pressure. He also describes reorganising the hospital's critical care into four sections: patients positive for Covid, negative for Covid, those waiting for test results and those who test negative but are symptoms positive. Nationally, he tells Erika, those who falsely test negative, is between 5-10%.And Inside Health contributor Dr Margaret McCartney delves into the accuracy of antigen swab tests (the test that tells you whether you have the virus or not). False negatives, test results that report the person doesn't have the virus when in fact they do, have serious implications for health care professionals, who might return to work on the basis of a mistaken result. Caution is advised, Dr McCartney advises, when symptoms contradict the test result. A cytokine storm is a variant on a hyperactive immune reaction, where the body thinks its own tissues are invaders. Cytokines are small proteins that trigger more immune activity or less. In a cytokine storm the cytokines rage through the bloodstream, throwing our immune system out of balance and leading to severe illness and even death. This hyper inflammation has been seen in Covid-19 patients and Dr Jessica Manson, consultant rheumatologist at University College London Hospitals and co-chair of the national group of hyper inflammation doctors, tells Claudia what is and isn't known about how to treat cytokine storms in patients with coronavirus.Producer: Fiona Hill

It's well established that the best thing smokers can do for their health is to quit. Smoking contributes to many of the underlying conditions that undermine recovery from coronavirus and it is pretty clear that a coronavirus patient who smokes will likely have a worse outcome than one who doesn't. The FDA in the US recently went so far as to suggest smoking might increase the risk of contracting the virus at all. Nevertheless, existing data coming from various studies of patients around the world appear to show smaller numbers of smokers amongst the hospitalized cases than might be expected from local smoking populations. There are fewer smokers than there should be in the data. But why?As the University of Edinburgh and CRUK's Prof Linda Bauld tells Claudia, there may be several simple reasons for this, such as data gathering - that patients' smoking status is going unrecorded or unverified. But a study last week from France goes so far as to suggest that nicotine itself, know to disrupt some of the receptors viruses use to enter cells, may be conferring some kind of a protection. It is just a hypothesis, but while the dangers of smoking tobacco still stand, studies on Covid-19 patients using nicotine patches might be worthwhile. And if you are trying to quit, nicotine replacement therapy might be an even better idea just now than was thought.Inside Health's resident GP Dr Margaret McCartney talks of her concerns for NHS non-urgent treatments being side-lined under the current virus squeeze, and some of her hopes for the future. Professor Pamela Qualter and Dr Margarita Panayioutou describe why lockdown is an important time to do more psychological research into the effects of loneliness and other responses while we have the chance.And in this week's update from Southampton General, where Inside Science's Erika Wright has been speaking to frontline health workers every week, Mr Robert Wheeler, a surgeon and clinical law expert muses on some of the legal aspects of our coronavirus response.