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We now have a coronavirus case in London. I suspect this will shift policy by tomorrow. I don't understand why Air China are still flying people in to UK.

I am not so sure. On the train back from Switzerland we watched everyone touching their faces all the time and realised we did the same. But since sharing a queue with 500 people from Beijing I have realised just how close I may be to being infected and I have not touched my face today except...

OK with me but I might get worried that if it goes on Facebook all the supermarkets will have empty shelves by tomorrow lunchtime! Fortunately we stocked up this afternoon.;)

Don't worry, my wife and I went shopping this afternoon for the provisions we need and we will be pretty much self-isolating anyway. I think it very unlikely that there are any false positives for a specific RNA assay. This isn't like an antibody or T cell response test where normal and...

I had forgotten - he was a co-author on the 1989 paper that claimed to be a speculative hypothesis paper about CBT for ME yet went on to say what should be done about 15 times (before any trials had been done). Perhaps the worst of all papers in the field.

I got the impression there wasn't much on the brink about it!

There would be no point testing me for virus now. My only likely contact was last night with some mask-wearing people from a Beijing flight. If a was infected I would not have detectable virus for a few days almost certainly. But I agree that not everyone is getting this right. I would score as...

This is pure plagiarism. I am sure it was in a Monty Python sketch in 1977 with John Cleese as Monica Streeb-Grebeling.

I agree, deeply disappointing. By all means listen to what Dr B has to say but one could have hoped for a more enlightening comment.

I had a peep. It is too dreadful to even register for this month's free peepie. I was quite interested by Thought for Today today on BBC Radio 4 Today. A regular lady priest was agonising over the issue of whistleblowers in the context of the Chinese doctor who reported the coronavirus and got...

I am tempted to make a Wonko-style nonsensical observation here - but only to provide a sort of 'Amen chorus' to an eternal truth. I have visions of dung beetles pushing balls of pseudoscientific dung up a sand dune to feed their larvae dressed in blue cardigans and other assorted 'chattering...

Which makes me wonder why as a rheumatologist seeing hundreds of new patients a year for thirty years I can recall seeing no more than a dozen people who I now realise had ME/CFS. Maybe ME/CFS is not referred specifically to rheumatologists but at least I should have seen more people with CFS...

Most micro-organisms do not survive more than a few minutes at 80 Celsius (176F). As I understand it viruses of this sort tend not to like being completely dried out and away from host environment for very long anyway. 100 Celsius kills almost anything (212F) except strange spore forming...

I don't really understand your scepticism @large donner. This is a virus that produces pneumonia bad enough to require hospital care in maybe one person in seven affected. It may kill as many as one in fifty and maybe more because the death figures ahave to be compared with the diagnosis figures...

Worth reading the Kekule blog mentioned by Leila. Mortality from regular flu seems to be about 0.1%. For the new coronavirus the figure looks to be about 2% but if this is underestimated because of lag in diagnosis to death it might be above 10%. Strangely the MRC have put out an estimate of 18%...

That blog looks like an excellent and unbiased assessment. The only thing I would quibble with is the idea that wearing a mask might raise ungrounded fears. I see a much bigger problem with people forgetting to be careful. Thus, yesterday evening I arrived at Heathrow and had to queue for nearly...

But Charles goes on to point out that things are getting more serious quite quickly. As I see it if everyone thinks that the risk is nearly zero then the virus is pretty well guaranteed to spread unnecessarily. I would personally advise everyone to take the risk seriously. I was amused to see...

I am tempted to rephrase the old (unjustified as it was ) adage: Those who can understand science, do science. Those who can't become professors of the public understanding of science.

I have not looked in detail but it seem as if they previously found a (very slight) increase in antibody levels to receptors in ME/CFS patients but now they find that these antibodies do nothing to the receptors, whereas ordinary people's antibodies do do something. That seems pretty confusing.

If I remember correctly glycolysis means the oxygen-independent (anaerobic) breakdown of sugars to pyruvate. So it is not actually the 'burning' of sugar of aerobic respiration. I am not sure I can comment more usefully on the lactate results. Snow Leopard tends to be good on this.