Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

We are weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life.

Nymed Tim Haafed.

Nearly 15 million people around the world have died from the impact of COVID,

directly or indirectly during the first two years of the pandemic.

That is the estimate from a new report by the World Health Organization.

It was a very surreal day. I got up very early and then was inundated with

requests for interviews. That was all very...

Meet John Wakefield. He's a professor of biostatistics at the University of

Washington in the US. Over a year he's been working with the World Health Organization

to estimate how many people have died globally because of the pandemic.

Last week their work was finally made public and it didn't take long before there was

controversy about some of the results.

The Intergovernment has come out strongly against the WHO.

Questioning the report at multiple levels.

Well I won't miss my words here. The at WHO estimations of excess deaths are essentially useless.

We'll get to all that but let's start with what John and his team set out to do.

We really need to know how many people died during the pandemic and excess

mortality is the best measure of that. So many deaths went unrecorded and I just think that's a

travesty in this day and age. They wanted to measure excess deaths during the pandemic.

How many more people died in 2020 and 2021 than you would expect?

It's a useful measure of the total toll of the pandemic because it doesn't rely on testing

...