Charlotte MacDonald

speaker

1,889 appearances 62 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2010 last heard Apr 2025

Charlotte MacDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Deaths at Home, Supermarket Infections and the Cobra Effect · 27 Jan 2021 podcast

Now, these were instances where two people had gone to the same place and also both developed COVID.

Yeah, but if you're talking about a town with a big supermarket and two people in the town both got Covid and both went to the supermarket, you've not really learnt anything.

And that's what this table was showing.

Among the locations where several people with Covid visited, supermarkets made up 20% of them.

So basically, the 20% figure was lifted from a table and misinterpreted.

There isn't a table which gives the proportion of people who went to a supermarket in the run-up to testing positive for COVID-19.

And even if there was, that wouldn't tell us that they caught COVID at the supermarket.

We just don't know that.

It would, but it's not easy to do that for such a sneaky virus.

That's why the SARS-CoV-2 virus is hard to control and explains why the disease has spread so widely and caused so much suffering.

I spoke to Hayley Thompson from Imperial College London, who co-authored a meta-analysis of contact tracing studies from around the world.

Hayley says more data is needed on cases connected to specific locations to be able to say much about whether the virus was being spread there.

Exactly.

You'd have to do a full genomic sequencing of each confirmed case to know if they'd caught the same version of the virus.

The fact is, we just don't have enough data to track people and their interactions.

So I'm afraid, Tim, we just don't know.

More or Less · Is Mansa Musa the richest person of all time? · 25 Mar 2019 podcast

Hello and welcome to More or Less here on the BBC World Service.

Let's start with a big number.

400 billion US dollars.

That's the estimated fortune of the richest man that ever lived.

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