Ni sa bula vinaka (A warm hello in Fijiian - but I reckon you lot already knew that), - Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. I feel markedly better today. And than you for the many felicitations I have received. I appreciate them. - I watched the MS Society webcast with Prof Evangelou (the lead neuro at Nottingham) yesterday. I thought it might be a rip-off of the Shift efforts but he was really good at steering it onto one of my favourite topics - risk. Risk is a hard topic to get into because the word is subject to such lazy abuse so much of the time. Not in a way to intentionally misinform (well, not usually) but often unnecessarily frightening. - I have two really good - non-academic - books about risk that I will always fall back on to explain things. They are both written by David Spiegelhalter (he is head of the Walton Centre for the public understanding of risk). The are really interesting and sometimes amusing too. These are links but I am not endorsing Amazon - http://tiny.cc/artofstats & http://tiny.cc/normchron ------ MS Stuff ------ The fact is that some pwMS will relapse or are relapsing now. Managing relapses remotely is covered in an article here: https://tinyurl.com/t4n9nrb It also discusses if steroids are bad for you during a Covid-19 infection. - About 1/3 of the Shift.ms crowd are from Canada and the US. Great news, there is a research register for you too: https://www.covims.org/ Its so so critical to log your data (anonymized - spelt with a zee to make you happier) to enable a research-based understanding of Covid-19 in MS to be built. We are all in this together. You can also access it through this site: https://www.iconquerms.org/ ------ Social Stuff ------ You may have MS but you gotta eat. Well, I love eating and imagine I will need a crane to lift me out of the window of our flat once this hiatus is over. In the meantime - if you are struggling to get a food delivery slot then it is easy to remedy. This advice is for a weeks time and can't fix am immediate issue. - 1 - Register yourself here: https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus-extremely-vulnerable - 2 - Register with online delivery. (I initially did this with Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury, Tesco, Waitrose, Ocado and Iceland - a bit of a fag but worth trying) - 3 - You will then be contacted by Sainsbury's at the very least. I got the following in an email: "As part of this, we’ve recognised the need to prioritise our most vulnerable customers for home delivery slots. The government has identified you as someone who is extremely vulnerable to coronavirus, which is why we’re contacting you. You’ll now be given priority access to home delivery slots." - 4 - I logged on and as if by magic it looked like it used to do. Eh boils. Shopping arrives tomorrow. You can even get delivery to two addresses ( @chezy17 - you said you were having to drop things off for your mum?) which makes things easier if you are looking after others. - THIS IS AN ADD ON: - apols. I forgot this. If you want to see some credibly conducted public research (My MSc was in political research and I know KCL stuff here is pretty robust) and if you want to either marvel at how good we are or clap your hands to your head at some of the frankly mad/moronic 'beliefs' that have taken hold then read on. It is nicely presented and I urge you to read on to the section on some of the correlations. Frightening! https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/coronavirus-in-the-uk.pdf - This too will pass. Stay well. -