Throughout 2021, two leading lights of the Royal Statistical Society Covid-19 Task Force drew on data for a weekly Observer column, and found themselves in the middle of Covid culture wars
Individual experiences and suffering are, of course, at the heart of the pandemic. But one way to understand what has happened is through putting those experiences together – and statistics are those personal stories writ large. And this pandemic has brought unprecedented demand to explain all the numbers that have been flying around.
This has not been without its problems and we’ve had to learn some hard lessons, such as the journalistic skill of brevity. Since January 2021, we’ve been writing a weekly column in this paper about Covid numbers, covering everything from infections to deaths, vaccines to mental health, masks to lockdowns.