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Hello and welcome to More or Less, the show you can count on to make it count when

taking account of miscounts and other numerical naughtiness.

This week we like to have fun between the spreadsheets as much as anyone, but England's

test and trace system has lost thousands of positive test results between two spreadsheets,

what happened and why does it matter?

How common are lasting symptoms from Covid?

If you survey people about the death toll, they'll make mistakes.

What do those mistakes teach us?

And pedants vs poets on the subject of exponential growth.

First, last weekend it emerged that 15,841 coronavirus cases in England had gone unreported

over a period of eight days.

This had two obvious consequences.

First, because those cases weren't transferred to the contact tracing system, there were long

delays in attempting to reach people they may have infected with coronavirus, as we know,

when it comes to limiting the spread of the virus, every hour counts.

Second, we were given a distorted picture of what was happening to the number of positive

test results in the last week of September and the first days of October.

Before the cock-up was spotted, it looked like the daily number of reported cases was starting

to slowly decline.

With the missing cases added, it was clear an upward trajectory was in fact continuing.

So what went wrong?

...