Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with the programme all about the

numbers all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford. Over the last month,

Black Lives Matter protests have taken place in the UK, the US and across the world.

Matt Hancock, the UK's health secretary, warned that gathering in large groups risked spreading

the virus. We're now a few weeks on from these protests, and we've been watching the data,

but no spike in infections has appeared. So why is that? We wondered. Ruth Alexander has been looking

into this. Hello Ruth. Hi Tim. Yes, looking at the UK's statistics, it seems surprising that there's

been no spike in the national or local data, but have consulted various experts and they confirmed

that indeed so far there hasn't been. There have been a few small spikes in cases in a few local

authorities in the last couple of weeks, but there's no obvious pattern to these that links to

the protests. And in the US, the number of cases in some states has been rising since restrictions

were eased, but analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research of more than 300 US cities

found no evidence that the demonstrations reignited the spread of COVID-19 in the three weeks that

followed them. So why haven't these gatherings, in some cases, mass gatherings resulted in a

noticeable increase in cases? It's a question I put to Devis Shreda, Professor and Chair of Global

Public Health at Edinburgh University. One thing might be that the pictures may not accurately

capture how people were distancing, and I know in the Black Lives Matter protests, there were

quite a lot of use of masks, of hand sanitizer, of people being quite cautious to make sure they

work one to two meters away from other people. I think the second thing is one thing we're learning

with is virus is where it transmits and where it doesn't. Culinary research seems to show that this virus

dies within minutes. Outside, so if someone sits on a bench and touches it and it's a warm sunny day

and then moves on and someone else sits there a few minutes later, the chance of them captain

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