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Hello and welcome to more or less with me, Tim Halford. Do you find numbers fascinating,

vital, important and occasionally confusing?

300,000 and 34, 974,000 tests.

1,870,000,000 tests. We're here to help out, be you pretty Patel, Donald Trump or any

other loyal listener who happens along. This week, this lockdown hurts, but it's saving

lives, so when are we going to be passed the worst? Can we compare how successful different

countries have been at containing the virus? Nurses, doctors and even bus drivers seem

to be dying at alarming rates, so how bad is the situation and why? And saving the biggest

issue until last, is it just me or have the birds started singing really loudly?

So first, we all want this to be over as soon as possible. I mean, the coronavirus pandemic,

not the program, so understandably, people are trying to figure out when the death rate

in the UK is going to reach a peak, and then we hope, decline. Dr Jason Oak is a senior

statistician at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University

of Oxford. He's been searching for this peak in a particular set of data.

The number you hear in the press that actually refers to deaths that occurred yesterday

and the day before that and the day before that, sometimes going back as far as a month.

And so it doesn't necessarily correspond to the number of people dying on a given day.

And it's when you start to look at that data, and that is released by NHS England, it's

just not broadcast in general. Then it's easier to see actually what's happening on a day

by day basis. So you've been recalculating the figures so that you can see how many deaths

occurred on each day rather than how many deaths have been announced each day. What those

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