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Hello and welcome to More or Less. We are the programme that helps you social distance

from misinformation while being a super spreader for statistical truth, and I'm Tim Halford.

This week, after Pastor and Toilet roles, the Financial Times is reporting a potential

shortage of condoms. Are we nine months away from a baby boom? We lift our eyes from the

headlines to the heavens to ask a Nobel Prize winner how many Earth-like planets there

are in existence. Not all heroes wear masks, but should we?

And first, coronavirus is a new story with many numbers, and most of those numbers come

with some pretty large caveats attached to them, or at least they should, but often they

don't, we're given a headline but not the footnotes, and the footnotes can be just as important.

For example, the number of cases only reflects people who've been tested for the virus,

and then found to be positive, that ignores many thousands more, millions perhaps, who

will have contracted the disease. The number of cases in turn relies on the number of tests

carried out, and the number of tests is not the same thing as the number of people who

have been tested, because some people have been tested more than once. In the UK, there

have been around 253,000 tests so far, but only around 209,000 people have been tested.

And the number which makes the headlines more than any other, the number which I find myself

checking obsessively is the number of people who've died from the disease. So should that

number two come with its own asterisk and cautionary footnote? Kate Lamble has been looking

into this at a Kate. Hi Tim, you'd think that it would be hard to get confused over something

as simple and sad as the number of deaths, but in fact there are several different figures

for the UK. The most commonly used is the figure released at 2pm every day by the department

...