How much Covid in the World?

As the 2026 World Cup approaches its end, what is the biggest factor in who wins? Is it extraordinary moments of attacking magic? Gritty defensive organisation? Or is it all just a question of luck and random chance? We look at how mathematicians and analysists make sense of chao ...  Show more

Recently a post did the rounds on Twitter, claiming that people who play tennis live on average 9.7 years longer than people who play other sports.The figure comes from a recent analysis of people's exercise habits in Denmark. But not everyone on Twitter was convinced. Tennis is ...  Show more

All of a sudden it seems like everyone knows someone who has tested positive for COVID. Are we back in a wave? How bad could it get? How effective will the new vaccine be? What do we actually know about COVID now that we didn’t before, and will it protect us? We talk to Atlantic ...  Show more

Everybody hopes that the new super-charged Omicron variant of coronavirus will be less severe, but even if it is, it’s spreading so fast and infecting so many people, health services around the world could still buckle under the strain.Two years into the pandemic, Claudia Hammond ...  Show more

When all restrictions are lifted in a highly vaccinated country, how manageable is the coronavirus? Both Israel and UK’s experiments to do just that, have raised new worries about raising the risk of new vaccine resistant variants. Claudia Hammond and her panel of global experts ...  Show more

With the prime minister proposing an end to self-isolation requirements as early as the end of the month, we thought we would check in with all things pandemic-related this week. We hear from mathematical biologist Dr Kit Yates from the University of Bath and UCL’s Professor Chri ...  Show more