Sad to hear a temporary mortuary is to be set up at RAF Upper Heyford 

Its ok saying lets do more home deliveries but the manpower or vans just aren't there , yes it makes sense but I'm afraid it not that easy 

Knowing how crowded some parks can be normally it shows that we are not cutting down as much as we could be doing ideally (i appreciate that some people do not have much choice though in where they can go, just plodding up and down the streets is not great) and i imagine that with the nice weather at the weekend the figure will be back up to 100% or more. Personally i have only been going out running after dark; i did try going out at 7pm earlier in the week but there were a lot of people around.

Yes, going to a local park is almost advised currently to ensure people can get daily exercise.if people are keeping their distance going to a park is a good idea rather than one to be condemned. The Google data don’t show whether people are “socially distancing”.

Out of interest - what exactly is the risk in a park if people are making sure they are way more than 2 metres apart, other than their own family?

Seems an obsession about this which hasn't been clearly explained in terms of additional risk over say shopping which I think some people are over doing judging by the huge queues and waiting lists. We shouldn't be eating more so why??

France

• 5,233 new cases and 588 new deaths in hospitals


• 6,662 patients in intensive care +263 on yesterday

I've posted this before on here, elsewhere and even emailed some epidemiologist professors but I am still amazed that it generates little interest. I am talking about the extended dry continuous hacking cough that I had a the end of December that lasted three weeks accompanied by a short fever. Almost everybody round here had it and judging by what I keep reading on social media so did thousands if not millions of others from November onwards. Some even said they were hospitalised. I've never had  bronchitis or any other respiratory disease. People keep enmphasising no cold or flu symptoms. It crops up on every social media thread when Covid -19 Symptoms table is displayed.

Surely this should be subject of some research to eliminate it or otherwise. It was a massive event after all, before we had even heard of Corona virus.

Was thinking about this earlier. On a day where i travel to work on a rush hour tube, through a crowded station and back home on a crowded tube i reckon that i may be within 2 metres of as many as 20 different people, some for 10-20 minutes at a time. Given that the rate of spread of the virus has been to double in about 2.5 - 3.5 days (and that other situations would surely represent an easier transmission, ie where you are shaking hands, etc, rather than just being physically close) then this would suggest to me that being within a radius of 1-2 metres of someone isn't that dangerous. I would have thought that the problems would be actual physical contact or having somebody breath heavily/cough/sneeze on you, or through touching an infected surface.

One of the things that has surprised me about this virus is that it hasn't spread quicker in London given how many used crowded tubes a couple of weeks ago.

Why do we seem to suddenly need more food? There weren't queues before or delivery issues so if people behaved the same there wouldn't be now. 

Sorry to be pedantic - the old editor in me just won't go away. But this has been bothering me, Gavin. France - the nation state - is singular so it should be 'France has reported...'

Sorry - cannot help myself

Is the old editor in you allowed to start a sentence with "but"?

Good spot. It should, of course, have started: 'However, this....'

How is this possible?

I would assume your own immune system would learn to create antibodies the longer you have it?

Or is it like Spanish flu and triggers an overreaction in the immune system?

That would be nice but totally impossible here. There are only so many times you can stay up to the early hours trying to get a non-existent slot two weeks ahead!

Garden waste bin collection has been suspended in E Suffolk.

This is why mass testing is needed to work out whether this is true. I had a two-day fever between Xmas and New Year which I'd put down to food poisoning, perhaps it wasn't... Won't know until I get tested. Even if that comes positive for antibodies, who's to say that was it and I've had it asymptomatically?    I suppose when we do test, it still won't tell us exactly 'when', but at least it will tell us 'not again'.

Same here in Croydon. Chavs hanging around in groups as normal, the coppers nowhere to be seen, but probably harassing a middle aged lady driving to a shop

The cops go for easy targets. They don't care if your house is burgled, but if you ignore a parking fine....

This country is finished. I know I always say that, but this time its true!

The problem is that people who caught the virus early on, would most likely have been younger fitter people who had been travelling to Asia on business or holiday. If any of them caught the virus, it is quite likely it would have been missed - they may have been asymptomatic, or just had something they put down to a winter cold or the flu. The early cases which were uncovered, tended to be those who had passed on the infection to someone who then had a more serious reaction. So we will never know how many cases could have been in the country prior to the problem becoming all too apparent. But I think we are agreed that much more serious border controls should have been introduced weeks earlier with port screening measures in place.

I wrote the following to my MP on 6th March - I have not yet had a response:

"One of the important reasons for containing the outbreak is that China is interviewing all infected people nationwide about their contact persons and then test those. There are 1,800 teams in Wuhan to do this, each with at least 5 people. But the effort outside of Wuhan is also big. In Shenzhen, for example, the infected named 2,842 contact persons, all of whom were found, testing is now completed for 2,240, and 2.8% of those had contracted the virus. In Sichuan province, 25,493 contact persons were named, 25,347 (99%) were found, 23,178 have already been examined and 0.9% of them were infected. In the province of Guangdong, 9,939 contacts were named, all found, 7,765 are already examined and 4.8% of them were infected. That means: If you have direct personal contact with an infected person, the probability of infection is between 1% and 5%

This also correlates perfectly with Taiwan's response. They suspended links to China and they had to cook up their own system, which is close to this (I suspect the Chinese may have copied it, Taiwan did it in early January as the first in the world when they became suspicious of a viral outbreak in their neighbour).

Europe have messed up - they should have taken events in Italy very seriously from the outset and closed borders.

P.S. Taiwan really is the role model for how to deal with this."

If you are relatively young, healthy, live near a supermarket and are not self-isolating then shouldn't you do your bit by going to said supermarket to get your groceries and leave the more vulnerable a better chance of getting a home delivery, at least until the system is able to cope with more people ordering home deliveries? With most supermarkets allowing fewer people in at a time, queues nicely spaced out, etc, i think the chances of catching anything at the supermarket are pretty low.

You're lucky to have a garden waste bin collection! Here we'd be glad to 'ave even a garden 

Yes but if you think you had food poisoning and just a fever why would you think you had Corona virus?. I am talking about people with THE symptoms as being spelt out to us. UNCONTROLLABLE DRY COUGH, FEVER, FATIGUE and BREATHING PROBLEMS are the things to look out for. Now it is true I didn't notice fatigue or much breathlessness but many did from what I have read.

Ours went on the 27th March

Perhaps it's safer in the park than in a tower block with flammable cladding?

Thanks for that, DrM. We used to have a nickname for such sloppy nonsense - we called it the "natural arbitrary line". Says it all. The other phrase sometimes used was "Which toe shall I shoot off?"

My wife keeps quoting that TV advert: "I don't know. Nobody knows..." 

I find it depressing that so many people are quite so ignorant of scientific facts, unaware that there is a scientific method and that prediction inevitably carries the possibility of being wrong - an valuable stepping stone to being right.  "I might be wrong" makes many folks uneasy. Happily, most weather-orientated folks are more than aware of that issue!

Roger