Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a program that looks at

numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford.

2020 is finally drawing to an end, and not a moment too soon, but even if the year has

been unusual, some things don't change, and that means it's time for our traditional

numbers of the year episode.

We've asked some numbers minded people to take a look back on the year and think of one

number that really stands out for them.

Next up, Oliver Johnson, Professor of Information Theory at the University of Bristol in the

UK.

My number is 1506.

That's the total number of coronavirus cases in the whole of Europe that were recorded

by the end of February.

So at that stage, it didn't seem like much of a problem.

And the reason that that's an interesting number is because of what happened next.

So by the beginning of April, we were up to about half a million cases.

And so what we'd seen was that the cases had gone up by a factor of 300, and that's obviously

pretty terrifying.

I mean, going up by a factor of 300 in that time meant that the epidemic was doubling

every three and a half days, which, as we saw, can very rapidly get out of control.

And just for comparison to that 1,506 cases in total, the European Union was recording

more than 200,000 cases a day in early November.

Of course, in the early months, many countries didn't have the capacity to carry out a lot

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