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Hello and welcome to More or Less, the program that explores and explains the numbers

all around us in the news and in this strange parallel existence we now call life.

I'm Tim Halford.

This week we examine criticisms of Imperial Colleges' epidemiologists.

We ask how A leveled and GCSE grades are likely to be allocated, given that the exams

have vanished in a puff of social distancing.

Adam Kosharski, author of The Rules of Contagion, tells us about the history of epidemiology.

The supermarkets.

How their supply chains holding up, how much stockpiling is really going on, and is coronavirus

having a different impact on men than on women.

But first, it's difficult to remember a new story with as many numbers in as the coronavirus

pandemic, and the thing about numbers is you need to get them right.

Mail on Sunday colonist Peter Hitchens tweeted this over the weekend.

Professor Ferguson and Imperial College have now dropped their coronavirus death predictions

from 500,000 to 20,000 to today's 5,700.

Could anyone else have shifted so totally, so fast and still be taken seriously?

It makes Monty Python look serious.

Professor Ferguson, we are led to conclude, is not the epidemiological messiah, he's

a very naughty boy.

Okay, well let's start at the beginning.

Professor Neil Ferguson leads the COVID-19 Response Team at Imperial College London, which

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