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Hello and welcome to more or less the show that multiplies understanding without sowing

division and which tries to make sure everything adds up.

This week lots have talked about the virus spreading in the community but how many people

are being admitted to hospital with Covid-19?

Do false positives mean that official cases are actually fake news?

Spoiler? No? Do coffee and pregnancy mix?

And the queen, Mao and Gandhi go head to head to head. Who is on the most stamps and coins?

But first, the UK is now seeing a second wave of coronavirus, says the Prime Minister Boris

Johnson, and so new restrictions designed to limit the spread of Covid are being introduced

all over the place. Understandably there's much discussion of how bad the situation really

is and whether the Prime Minister is overreacting, underreacting or just overacting.

So how fast is the virus spreading? Well we got one idea from the graph of the week

described here by the man who put it in front of our terrified eyeballs, the chief scientific

adviser, Sir Patrick Valance.

At the moment we think that the epidemic is doubling roughly every seven days. It could

be a little bit longer, maybe a little bit shorter, but let's say roughly every seven days.

If, and that's quite a big if, but if that continues, unabated, and this grows doubling

every seven days, then what you see of course, let's say there were 5,000 today, it would

be 10,000 next week, 20,000 a week after, 40,000 a week after. And you can see that by mid

October, if that continued, you would end up with something like 50,000 cases in the middle

of October per day.

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