What a difference a year makes!

A year has passed since The Corpus closed its offices due to the pandemic and the Prime Minister asked us all to work from home ‘for a few weeks’. Three national lockdowns later and the team has now been working from home for an entire year – a long time to be apart by anyone’s standards.

So, to mark this strange anniversary, we asked everyone at The Corpus what they have been up to over the past 12 months and what they have learned. 

Not surprisingly, our collective knowledge of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus, has greatly increased over the past year. In fact, 1 in 10 of us at The Corpus actually contracted COVID-19.

On a scientific note, we have learned about the pathophysiology of COVID. In common with much of the country we have been endlessly reminded of the significance of the R number and about the development and mode of action of different vaccines, especially mRNA vaccines. We’ve learned that DMARDs (disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs) make a difference to outcomes in COVID-19 symptoms, about COVID-associated thrombosis, and that face masks reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Aside from COVID, we’ve continued our deep dives into the different types of meetings we can offer, such as advisory boards, preceptorships, trial investigator meetings and recorded webinars, in addition to our regular medical education meetings. The demand for our meetings grew by an enormous 52% during the pandemic and we ran a total of 264 virtual meetings in 2020 alone.

We also looked at the average number of hours we each saved over the year from our daily commute: a whopping 475 hours per person! Alongside this, we tallied up the average number of hours that each person spent on video calls per week in 2020:9 hours and 15 minutes!

When not working, The Corpus team also inherited a few extra members long the way, including two cats, three dogs and even some sea monkeys. As a group we’ve also been exercising a lot more, with running, cycling and walking being our most popular forms of exercise.

All going well we will be back in the office in a few months. When that time comes, what will we miss about working from home? Unsurprisingly more than half of us will miss the short commute from bed to laptop and many of us don’t plan to return to the office full time. As long as we can do our job and can get into the office if necessary, we can work where we like.

Finally, what are we all looking forward to most about our return to the office? Apart from the odd ‘Pret’ and ‘Wasabi’ response, almost 100% of us said we’re most looking forward to ‘seeing people, real people, the newbies, the oldies, friendly faces, other humans, my colleagues, my teammates, the banter, having a good catchup, going to the pub after work’.

A year is a long time to be apart – let’s hope we don’t have to wait too much longer.