Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, where the programme that spends

our holiday season unwrapping one statistic at a time, and I'm Tim Harford.

It's become a tradition of ours to gather guests old and new to take a look back at the

most concerning peculiar or quite frankly extraordinary numbers of the year. Our first guest comes

from an organisation producing thousands of charts across hundreds of topics, so it's

safe to say she's got numbers at her fingertips.

I'm Dr Hannah Richey, I'm Head of Research at Our Road in Data and I'm a Senior Red Researcher

at the University of Oxford. My number of the year for 2021 is 12 million.

We're starting big. So the 12 million represents the estimated number of excess deaths that

occurred globally this year. That means 12 million more people died in 2021 than we'd

expect to see in a normal year. We've certainly had an extraordinary couple of years, at least

medically speaking, but can we attribute all of those extra deaths to Covid?

We should be careful not to directly attribute all of that to Covid.

Loyal more or less listeners may recall that measuring excess deaths is an alternative

way to estimate the impact of the pandemic. Rather than trying to attribute deaths to Covid,

you count any death from any cause and ask if there are more or fewer than in a typical

year. This is useful because it can be surprisingly difficult to determine what was the direct

Covid death and what wasn't. We know for example that due to lack of testing or under

reporting that we've probably missed a lot of deaths from Covid. In some countries we

just know that testing just has not been furrow enough to pick up all of the Covid infections

and therefore Covid deaths. On the other hand there is the additional issue that some people

might have died with a positive test result and therefore being counted as a Covid

...