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Hello and welcome to More or Less, the program which, rather than crossing the tees and

dotting the eyes, puts the decimal points in the right position while admiring those

equations with the squiggly bits. We do numbers is what I'm saying, and this is the last

episode before the program moves to a new point in the schedule. More about that later.

First, we have not one but two very based items for your delectation. Several loyal listeners

want us to revisit our tomato story from last week, and we will. And one unique listener

wants to know whether he could cover Lichtenstein in jam. I don't understand either, but I

am going to do the maths anyway. But first, and arguably more important, the coronavirus.

A couple of weeks ago, we spoke to Dr Natalie McDermott of King's College London about the

new coronavirus. She explained the highly uncertain numbers behind the spread of the disease

and told us that it wasn't a global pandemic, at least not yet. A lot has happened in the

last two weeks, more cases, including in the UK, more deaths. And the virus even has a name

now, COVID-19. And strikingly, on Wednesday night, there was a sharp revision of the figures

coming out of China, with deaths up 20% and cases up about a third overnight. So first

thing Thursday morning, Dr McDermott came into the studio to tell us what was new.

The figures went up by about 15,500 cases and went up by about just over 220 deaths. And

at first it was a little bit unclear why that had happened, and we're still trying to

get the exact details of what happened. But it seems that the case definition in Hubei province

and Wuhan for a confirmed case of COVID-19 has changed. And subsequently, there's a lot more

people being included within that confirmed case definition now. What we don't know is how many

of those people were just in the last 24 hours, or if some of this is looking back over the last

...