You can’t stop the bleep

The bleep is a technological relic, but smartphones are only as effective as wifi or network coverage 3 The bleep, like talking directly to a patient instead of them being triaged away, offers some reassurance that an emergency won’t be missed 4 Reassurance is one reason to provide home pulse oximetry to manage covid-19 remotely 5 Another is safety, but Trisha Greenhalgh and colleagues explain how clinical support is also required in the form of phone calls—for example, as part of a virtual ward setting A new research paper describes a system failure,7 one that potentially reached only 8% of contacts of symptomatic people 8 This is a worrying outcome when the B 1 1 7 variant increased the risk of death by about 60% 9 The long term impact of pandemic failures and measures on mental health remains unclear, though, as Louis Appleby explains,10 early evidence shows no sign of higher rates of suicide or self harm Overdue revisions to the Mental Health Act, however, remind us that mental illness can too easily lose priority 11 We’ve reduced our long term environmental impact after a trial of alternative wrappers for The BMJ’s weekly print edition