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Hello and welcome to the third wave of this season of more or less. We're your sometimes

cheerful, sometimes spiky, but always nerdy guides to the numbers all around us in the

news and in life. This week are smart motorways more dangerous. The government's COVID

dashboard reports higher vaccination rates for England as a whole than for any individual

region of England, what's going on there? And is it really true that most women are

wearing the wrong size bra? But first, where are we in this pandemic? It's getting

extremely confusing. We're a long way into a vaccine rollout that is among the fastest

in the world. The schools are open, as are the shops, as are the pubs. Each day just a handful

of deaths after a positive COVID test are being reported. That all seems fine. But there's

this scary new Delta variant, first identified in India. Official cases are rising fast,

doubling every 10 or 12 days. We're being told not to travel. And by the way, places

such as Germany won't let us in if we do. So what's going on? It's at times like this

that I like to reach for a trusty Cambridge professor. For example, Sir David Schpiegelholtter,

Director of the Winter Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication. And I began by

asking David how the current uptick in cases compares to the first and second ways of the

epidemic in the UK. We can't really compare cases with the first wave, because the data

then is so poor, there was so little testing going on. At the current level, we're getting

about 6,000 cases a day in the UK. And that's about where we were, around about 2020,

second of September last year. Both times now and then, they're roughly doubling about

every 10 to 12 days. So it's looking a bit like they start with the second wave. But there

is a big difference. And we have to look at the ages of these cases. And they're much

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