Daily: Inside the ‘Data-Demic’ with Professor David Spiegelhalter

The Bunker – News without the nonsense

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News, Government, Politics, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The COVID pandemic has seen us bombarded with statistics like never before, - case numbers, excess deaths and vaccination rates. But behind the numbers, is there another story waiting to be told? Professor David Spiegelhalter joins Ros Taylor to talk about his new book COVID By Numbers, which shines a new light on the pandemic from the hardest hit countries, to the benefits of different vaccines, and the effect of lockdown on our mental health and the economy. “Statisticians try to make sense of what’s going on, and there is a lot of demand for that” “The perpetual daily updates have kept numbers in people’s minds” “There has been a systematic change in the pattern of deaths, people aren’t going to hospital to die” “COVID has shone light on big gaps on our knowledge of other people’s lives” “When the media call out u-turns, it stops people making changes based on new evidence” “Statistics have been incredibly important, the PHE dashboard had 76 million hits within 24 hours during the 3rd lockdown” Presented by Ros Taylor. Produced by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producers: Jelena Sofronijevic and Jacob Archbold. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Stan. I'm at. Nice to meet you. So you took up photography where? I've always loved
0:05.5	photography but I turn it into earning a living at 60. I enrolled on a day course.
0:11.8	Well college. I loved going to college. It's good you can retry. I'm enrolled on the day course. But college?
0:13.0	I loved going to college.
0:14.0	It's good you can retrain and do something.
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0:55.3	look after theirs with dental life. Pickemic we wanted data. The danger we faced was
1:15.2	invisible. The things we were being told to do to combat it were unprecedented.
1:18.9	How many cases are there today? What are the chances my mother will catch it? What's the risk she'll die? How do I know that this new law the government has just passed will make any difference?
1:29.0	Statisticians and epidemiologists have tried to answer these questions and the answers they gave often provoked fury and disbelief.
1:37.0	That's often down to something called optimism bias, which we can talk about later.
1:40.0	Two of those statisticians, Sir David Spiegelhaulter and Anthony Masters, have just published a book
1:45.4	COVID by numbers making sense of the pandemic with data.
1:50.0	So David joins me today to talk about that book.
1:52.1	Welcome to the bunker David.
1:54.0	Oh, thanks for having me.
	...

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