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Hello and welcome to a brand new Bring Your Own Boos series of more or less,

the show that keeps a close eye on the numbers in the news and in life.

I'm Tim Haford.

This week we'll be discussing whether lockdowns led to a baby boom.

Reexamine a baffling claim about the number of children being abducted every year in

the US, and will run our statistical measuring tape up the inside leg of the government's

promise to give everyone a booster jab before New Year's Day.

But first, we were last on the Radio 4 airwaves in early October, which, after adjusting for

the passage of time in the pandemic, is half a lifetime ago.

Since then we've all had to learn how to spell Omicron, how to pronounce Omicron, and

rather a lot of us have been infected with Omicron.

The pandemic certainly seems to have entered a new phase, and it can't be entirely disastrous

because otherwise Kate Lamble would be in the studio with me explaining just how disastrous

it was.

Instead, I called a different friend of the programme.

My name is David Spiegerholtter, I'm chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and the Evidence

Communication at the University of Cambridge.

You are also, I should say, the co-author of Covid by numbers, making sense of the pandemic

with data recently published book.

But I've been of a bold move to publish a book about what turns out to be a moving target.

Exactly.

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