TY - JOUR T1 - Highlights from this issue JF - Emergency Medicine Journal JO - Emerg Med J SP - 571 LP - 571 DO - 10.1136/emermed-2021-211813 VL - 38 IS - 8 AU - Simon David Carley Y1 - 2021/08/01 UR - http://emj.bmj.com/content/38/8/571.abstract N2 - Welcome back to the latest edition of the EMJ. It’s high Summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and our hopes that COVID-19 would be a distant memory by now are sadly broken. We are in wave n+1 at the moment (where n depends on where you are in the world), but there is hope in sight as vaccine roll outs continue around the world.This month our Editor’s choice is the PRIEST study. This huge observational trial of COVID-19 19 patients presenting to UK emergency departments gave us essential information on risk assessment in the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a fantastic example of how a trial can be rapidly delivered in a pandemic and a lesson in how we need to plan for the pandemic after COVID-19. The study is particularly useful in that it focuses on information available to the emergency clinician in the form of well-known scores such as NEWS2 as opposed to data that may be available much later (such as some laboratory testing). While therapeutic trials of repurposed drugs such as the RECOVERY and REMAP-CAP trials have received much of the publicity in the wake of COVID-19 we must remember that as emergency clinicians it is diagnosis, prognosis, risk assessment and disposition decisions that are at the core of our specialty. The PRIEST study is … ER -