Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a show that likes to keep

a track of all things numbersy, and I'm Tim Harford.

It's been over a year since the pandemic really went global. It hit Europe badly in March,

and here in the UK the authorities scrambled to understand what was going on.

How many cases of this new Covid-19 were there? How many people were ending up in hospital?

And how many were dying?

A team was set up at Public Health England, a body overseeing the health services.

They began an online dashboard for the public, a website with easy-to-read figures that you can

take in with a quick glance, and just like the dashboard on a car, that capacity to get a quick

overview of what's going on has become an important feature of life in a pandemic.

One of the side effects of Covid is that people have become used to dashboards full of statistics.

At first, the UK's was rudimentary, just the total confirmed cases and deaths were posted.

But these days it hosts a whole range of numbers, graphs, maps, giving geographical breakdowns.

It has hospital data, testing data and vaccination data.

I spoke to Claire Griffiths, one of the lead analysts behind the project.

So on a daily basis there'll be one lead analyst, and then one dashboard analyst who is collating

the data that we need to collate manually. We've then got a pipeline which feeds in data from,

I think it's now about 25 different data sources. That starts at about eight o'clock in the morning.

What are the moments at which traffic to the site peaks? When are people most interested?

So they're most interested at four o'clock? That's when the new data are released.

That's right, yeah. So when the new data are released, we've got about 100,000 individual users

hitting refresh waiting for that information. The team at More or Less has depended on the UK's

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