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Hello and welcome to More or Less, the show that keeps a close eye on the numbers in

the news and in life. I'm Tim Halford. This week the show is so packed that we've postponed

a cameo from the late Donald Rumsfeld until next week, plenty to discuss before then,

though. Never mind the parties, just look at the economic growth, but it's the UK really

growing faster than other leading economies. The Omicron variant has raised the chance

that people are re-infected with Covid, how common is that and should it change the way

we read the statistics that have reported each day. The great statistician, Sir David

Cox, has died. We remember his life and his contribution to the science of counting.

And people keep comparing the number of food banks to the number of McDonald's restaurants.

So we ask, what do you measure if you want to understand hunger and food insecurity in

the UK? You may have noticed our Prime Minister is under a little bit of party pressure. Sorry,

work event related pressure at the moment. You may also have noticed an uptick in references

to an apparently surging economy from the Chancellor of the Exchequer and other Conservative MPs.

But we have the fastest growing economy in the G7, Mr Speaker. What today's figures do

show that the economy is experiencing a very strong recovery, fastest growth in the G7

group of countries. We've got the fastest growing economy in the G7. Could the political

pressure and the economic boasts be related? Well, that's not for us here at more or less

to say, but it definitely is for us to say whether these claims about the economy are true

or not. Economic growth is measured using growth-domestic

product or GDP, the total market value of all the goods and services produced in a country.

GDP doesn't measure everything we care about, but in the short term, GDP growth is usually

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