Good morning SA; I can’t give you a definitive answer as I have only normal public access, but while you’re waiting for a proper reply I can tell you this.
An update of the WordPress software including the forum software was performed a few days ago, and now, looking from my system I see some odd effects. Threading of comments seems intermittent, and the blue bar at the top which would normally contain something like “This topic has 34 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 2 hours, 35 minutes ago by So-and-so” now just reads “This topic is empty”. This seems to apply only to topics that have had a comment added since the software was updated. However, other topic have a wrong name for the latest commenter; for instance, the topic “Climate Change Hysteria” shows that “corinadt4” submitted the latest comment, but there is no such commenter on the thread, and the submission time is much more recent than the latest comment displayed.
I have been told that the failure of threading has open bug reports on the WordPress support site; probably the erroneous commenter names should be reported also.
Yes, the new topic about the virus seems to have been deleted, thank goodness; I had posted some comments there myself. It might be another bug I suppose, but either way the world is better off without too much disinformation about this, and I’m fed up with posting more accurate information from more relevant and reliable sources. “UK Column” for epidemiology? Urgh.