Daily: Inside the ‘Data-Demic’ with Professor David Spiegelhalter

The COVID pandemic has seen us bombarded with statistics like never before, - case numbers, excess deaths and vaccination rates. But behind the numbers, is there another story waiting to be told? Professor David Spiegelhalter joins Ros Taylor to talk about his new book COVID By Numbers, which shines a new light on the pandemic from the hardest hit countries, to the benefits of different vaccines, and the effect of lockdown on our mental health and the economy.

• “Statisticians try to make sense of what’s going on, and there is a lot of demand for that”
• “The perpetual daily updates have kept numbers in people’s minds”
• “There has been a systematic change in the pattern of deaths, people aren’t going to hospital to die”
• “COVID has shone light on big gaps on our knowledge of other people’s lives”
• “When the media call out u-turns, it stops people making changes based on new evidence”
• “Statistics have been incredibly important, the PHE dashboard had 76 million hits within 24 hours during the 3rd lockdown”

Presented by Ros Taylor. Produced by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producers: Jelena Sofronijevic and Jacob Archbold. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production

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