the short term question here is whether we can stay free from further covid restrictions. dan johnson, bbc news. let s stay with that concern over pulse oximeters, mentioned in danjohson s report. dr michael sjoding is from the university of michigan. he led research on racial bias in pulse oximetry measurement last year, finding a critical need to understand and correct racial bias in medical technologies. he told me more about his findings. this research came from the covid pandemic. i am a practising pulmonary physician and during the pandemic when caring for certain patients we noticed the pulse oximeter seemed to be less accurate when we looked at a more accurate labatory test called arterial blood gas that we don t perform as often. we saw that there seemed to be this discrepancy and we didn t quite understand why so we looked at, you know, skin tone as a factor and we looked at black patients compared to white patients and we found that there