Glasgow vs Rwanda
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tim explores a shocking claim that life expectancy in some parts of Glasgow is less than it is in Rwanda. But is that fair on Glasgow and for that matter is it fair on Rwanda? And a listener asks whether loss of smell is a strong enough symptom of Covid that it might be used to help diagnose the virus, replacing rapid testing.
Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Chloe Hadjimatheou
(Left: Rwanda refugee - photo Reza. Right: Glasgow homeless man - photo Christopher Furlong / both Getty images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service with a program that takes a critical |
| 0:05.8 | look at the statistics that shape our world and I'm Tim Halford. Scotland's largest city, Glasgow, |
| 0:13.6 | has a rich cultural heritage but there are areas of real deprivation. It recently drew unwelcome |
| 0:19.6 | attention from Fraser Nelson, the editor of the British magazine, the spectator. Here he is on |
| 0:26.0 | question time, a current affairs show in the UK. It's clearly meant to be a stark comparison, |
| 0:38.8 | giving the impression that there are parts of Glasgow where average life expectancy is worse than |
| 0:44.0 | in a country known for a bloody genocide in the 1990s. But a group of fact checkers based in |
| 0:50.5 | Scotland, the ferret fact service, looked into Fraser Nelson's claim and we invited one of them, |
| 0:55.8 | Alistair Bryan onto the show to tell us whether the comparison was fair to Glasgow and for that matter |
| 1:02.4 | to Rwanda. I think there's a few problems with the comparison that was made. One I think that |
| 1:09.0 | from our research we couldn't find an area where life expectancy was lower than the current life |
| 1:15.8 | expectancy in Rwanda. I should ask by the way, what is the life expectancy in Rwanda at the moment? |
| 1:20.9 | Well, according to the national and statistics of Rwanda, it's 69.7 for women and 65.8 for men. |
| 1:30.2 | In 2020 that's their projection. But okay, so high 60s. What was your other objection? |
| 1:35.6 | Comparing a whole country with a tiny area can only really be misleading because obviously within |
| 1:43.0 | local areas, the statistical breakdowns of different areas of Glasgow, there are some statistical |
| 1:48.4 | breakdowns that are very, very small areas, we're talking like in the low thousands of people, |
| 1:53.2 | particularly the less up-to-date statistics. Like there was a really widely stated |
| 1:58.1 | statistic of the life expectancy of an area in Glasgow called the Carlton, where life expectancy |
| 2:02.9 | was stated as for men as 54, which was widely reported in newspapers in mid 2000s and was seemingly |
| 2:10.6 | skewed by a number of specific local issues. So some hostels which were in that area, which looked |
| 2:17.4 | after adults with various drug alcohol, mental health problems, which inevitably meant that there |
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