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Hello and welcome to More or Less, the show that sweeps the curling stone of truth into

the House of Public Understanding whilst only occasionally falling face-first onto the

ice. This week, as we continue to wait for updates to the UK's policy on vaccinating

children against Covid, how big are the risks to children from the virus? We examine the

joys and sorrows of the attempts to forecast the spread of the virus using mathematical

modelling. MPs have been trying to solve simple probability questions, and not all of them

have got the answers right. And speaking of not getting the answers right, the correction

claxon is back as we eat humble pie over an error that may be both our smallest and

biggest ever mistake. But first, the Covid pandemic has required some difficult balancing acts,

weighing the risks and benefits of different courses of action, hopefully based on the

very best data. The challenge has been especially fraught in the case of children. Should they

be kept out of school? Should they wear face masks? Should they be vaccinated? How much

of a risk is Covid to them anyway? A recent claim catching attention online suggests

one answer to that last question. One in 100 children who catch Covid-19 get sick

enough with the disease to be admitted to hospital. This statistic seems to have come from data

published by a campaigning charity called Long Covid Kids. It's appeared in various places

including a video published by NHS England. We can't play you the original clip because

soon after it was published, it was taken down. But you know how social media works,

we read, like, retweet, the claim spread. And so did the rebuttals. I've been speaking

to Dr. Shamez Ladani, a pediatric infectious diseases consultant at St George's Hospital

London who's been leading on a number of surveillance programmes on Covid in children

...