Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We are weekly guide to the

numbers all around us and I'm Tim Halford.

The favourite pastime around the world now is to compare countries with one another,

who's fairing better or worse in the fight against coronavirus. But is this actually

helpful or in fact fair? Ruth Alexander's been thinking about this, hello Ruth.

Hi Tim, I have been and so have numerous loyal listeners, pat in Cheshire in the northwest

of England, sums up the mood in the inbox.

I find the comparison's meaningless as they don't relate to deaths per head of population

per country. Comparing the UK to Spain, Italy and the USA takes no account of populations.

So I'll be better or worse than others.

If you look at how these countries rank, you see that they're all in the top 10 in terms

of the number of cases and top five along with France in terms of deaths. But the US is

a way ahead of them all. It has by far the most cases, 770,000 and deaths, more than 41,000.

And that's seven times more cases in the UK and more than twice as many deaths.

But the population of the United States is about five times bigger than the UK's and Italy's

and seven times bigger than Spain's. So adjusting for that and looking at the number

of deaths for every million people, which seems like it might tell us more about what's

going on.

To some degree, it gives you a sense of the magnitude of the problem each country's

facing, but it doesn't necessarily give meaningful comparisons. When you look at how countries

rank on deaths per million population, the US slides down the table from top place to

12th place. And suddenly, they're in first place, meanwhile, is San Marino, followed

...