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Hello and thank you for downloading the more or less podcast with me, Tim Harford.

We are your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life.

This week my editor has been trying to figure out when I'll die, which is kind of him.

He says it's something to do with life expectancy data in general,

but there's an unnerving sparkle in his eyes as he crunches the numbers.

National Treasure Paul Lewis of Moneybox joins us to examine how many people pay inheritance tax.

Our cat correspondent returns with an antipodean claim about cat-on-bird incidents.

Also, it's said that there are more possible games of chess than there

are atoms in the observable universe. Can that really be right. But first. Last winter we extensively covered the struggles of the

NHS in England under winter pressures including COVID and flu. They weren't pretty. Accident and emergency departments

saw huge numbers of people waiting many, many hours to be admitted. Ambulance response times

grew alarmingly, and there were unprecedented delays even in the time taken to pick up 999 ambulance calls.

We wanted to look at how it's fairing this winter, so we called one of the legendary veterans of more or less. Now,

Newsnight Science Correspondent. She is also a person who can break bad news gently.

It's Kate Lamble. Hello Kate.

Hi, Tim. Let's start by looking at some of the

pressures the NHS is under. First up COVID the latest figures from the UK

health security agency's winter COVID-19 survey tell us we've just been through a wave of infections.

In mid-November, around 1.5% of people in England and Scotland had COVID.

A month on, in mid-December, it had COVID. A month on in mid-December it had nearly tripled to about 4.5%.

That's almost 1 in 20 people infected with COVID at the same time.

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