BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

Hello and welcome to the last in this series of more or less. This week our wage increases

inflationary. What about pension increases? Stephanie Flanders helps explain the wage price

spiral. Child care seems pretty expensive but many parents say they're not struggling

to pay for it. What's going on there? The wily French are back on the show with their

mysterious ways of counting. I will do my best to figure it out. But first, just when

we thought we'd get through a series of more or less without a new Covid wave, a pair

of surly Omicron variants show up. How worried should we be? And is more or less to blame?

Correlation isn't causation of course but every time there's a series there's a Covid

wave. It's getting a little suspect. As in all times of crisis I climbed to the search

light on the roof of Broadcasting House and sent out the stat signal. Within minutes,

Professor Sir David Speagle-Holter was on the scene. I began by asking him, was there

really a new wave of Covid and if so, was it our fault?

Probably not your fault but there is a wave. There's definitely an increase in infections

since mid-May they've been going up. But I don't think it's going to be a wave like

previous big spikes that we've seen before. It's likely to be much more shallow. We don't

know when it's going to top off but I think maybe swell is a better way to describe it.

I haven't done a Covid test for quite a while. I used to be doing them all the time. My

children used to do them twice a week now they're not doing them. A lot of our listeners

have got in touch and said now that testing is far less frequent. Can we trust the figures

on the dashboard to help us chart the epidemic?

Well, they may be useful for identifying trends but they cannot tell us how much virus

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