Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service with the programme all about

the numbers all around us in the news and in life and I'm Tim Haafard.

This week, how many of us have misconceptions about coronavirus?

I'm joined again by statistician Ula Rosling, who is the co-author of Factfulness and

the Director of the Gap Mindre Foundation. If you're a loyal listener, you might have

heard him talking to us last week about how effective Sweden's lockdown light has been.

This time, I'm speaking to him about research he's been conducting with the Gap Mindre Foundation,

about the misconceptions around coronavirus.

So the Gap Mindre Foundation is an independent educational foundation, specialised in global

misconceptions. We ask all kinds of fact questions and wherever people are very wrong,

we see a need for public education. So when corona came around, we started asking questions

about corona. And back in March, we started asking these questions in a first wave in five countries,

US, UK, Japan, Brazil and Italy. They then did a second round of research in June, in which they

added Australia, Canada, Germany, Mexico and the Netherlands. Some of the surveys were modestly

sized, but across the two rounds there were over 6,300 respondents in total. Gap Mindre

asked which they thought was deadlier, seasonal flu or coronavirus. Even back in March, when

they carried out the first surveys, it should have been clear that Covid was far more deadly.

In UK, 24% believed the flu was deadlier back in March. Now we ask this question again in June,

and only 7% in UK think that the flu is deadlier. So a vast majority have now come to realise that

corona is much more deadlier than the regular flu. So this is an enormous change. Very fast people

have come to realise what corona is. There was a similar trend in the US and in Brazil. And this

is important because the people who said they think the flu is deadlier also said they take less

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