BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

Hello and welcome to more or less the show that bows in friendly greeting while maintaining

a distance of one bed, two benches, half a giraffe, four platypuses or eight toasters

at all times.

We are all about the numbers in the news and in life and I'm Tim Haford.

This week we ask who respects lockdown, who breaks it and why.

While listeners are astounded by how many people reportedly flew into the UK in the

first three months of the year and we are on the story.

And some pub quiz joy involving a pencil, Roman numerals and Rob Easterwai.

But first, more than 35,000 people in the UK have now officially died from Covid-19 and

every day at the government press conference ministers add to that total.

If we look instead at excess deaths from all causes relative to recent years, the death

toll since the beginning of the crisis is nearly 60,000.

Hearing that already large number get ever bigger can make everything seem relentlessly

bleak, especially since the UK's death toll, however you measure it, is one of the highest

in the world.

But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this wave of the epidemic is waning.

Jason Oak is a statistician at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences

at the University of Oxford.

He's been looking at the number of deaths which actually occur each day rather than those

which are newly reported each day to get a more complete picture of how the current situation

is looking.

...