Hello and welcome to a brand new series of more or less. We are Weekly Guide to the Numbers in the News and in Life, and I'm Tim Harford. This week we're getting to grips with the unprecedented winter superflu, if indeed it is unprecedented, or for that matter, super. It's flu anyway, and we'll be running through the numbers. We'll also look at the prison services' curious habit of letting prisoners out early, or keeping them in for too long. We'll ask whether there's really a mass exodus from the UK under Labour, and why the US economy can't grow at 25% a year. First, winter pressures on the NHS have become a depressingly familiar story. Hardly a winter goes by now without worrying headlines about the strains that the health service is under. And the media didn't need much help drafting those headlines. This was part of a press release from NHS England. With record demand for A&E, and ambulances, and an impending resident doctor strike, this unprecedented wave of superflu is leaving the NHS facing a worst case scenario for this time of year. Loyal listener Fiona in Devon asked us whether what we're currently seeing really is unprecedented. She wants us to investigate, as you wish. After all, if you haven't got your health, then you haven't got anything. We asked reporter Nathan Gower to look into it. Hello, Tim. So this year, we don't just have flu, we have superflu? What's going on? So we've had quite a few headlines talking about an unprecedented situation, or record numbers. Now, that's true if you add the important caveat for this time of year. We get flu waves almost every winter, but not always at the same time. And this year, flu has come early. Tell me more. So let's look at hospital admissions in England. For the week ending the 1st of December, about 10 in every 100,000 of the population were admitted to hospital with flu. If we look at recent years with big flu waves, they reached those levels and then beyond, but not until a week or two later. So if the whole wave had been delayed by a couple of weeks, we wouldn't be hearing about record numbers. That's right. So you have a dizzying intellect. Wait till I get going. So, leaving the timing to one side, how does the scale of this current wave compare to previous waves? So as I said, the latest data has 10 in every 100,000 people being admitted to hospital with flu per week. This is substantially below the peaks of previous waves. So 2022 to 23, that was a really bad year and hospital admissions peaked at about 19 in every 100,000. Last year, the bad year, it peaked at 15. OK, so we're still not at those heights. That's right. The UK Health Security Agency, which monitors flu and other illnesses in the winter, says the latest admission rates are still in the medium category. It's a similar story if we look at infections. We're running about a week ahead of previous bad waves and it's still substantially below the peaks of those waves. We should also talk about what's not happening right now. 2022 to 23 was the worst flu wave we've had in years, but the NHS fed particularly badly because of what else was happening during that winter. We didn't just have a big flu wave, we also had COVID and RSV, another respiratory virus. All three waves peaked at pretty much the same time and this was a real nightmare for the NHS. Yes, I remember us covering it at the time. But we haven't got the same thing happening now. Thankfully, COVID levels are very low and they're not showing signs of increasing. RSV admissions to hospital have been increasing sharply, but at substantially lower levels than flu admissions, about three admissions per 100,000 rather than 10. And the latest data suggests that RSV may be peaking and hopefully will start to decline. OK, but NHS England seems worried about this particular strain of flu. They literally call it superflu, is it? Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. There are three main types of flu, the particular type that we're currently seeing dominate in England is called H3N2. Trips off the tongue. So what should we know about it? So H3N2 is generally thought to cause slightly worse disease in older people, which is one reason that health officials are concerned. But it also evolves relatively quickly and this year a new variant has emerged and become the dominant strain that's circulating in this current wave. To learn more, I spoke to Dr James Hay. He's a research fellow at the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford. Earlier in the year, James heard talk that we were facing a potentially difficult strain of H3N2. He decided to look at what the early data tells us. So what we were interested in doing is kind of looking at the growth rate of the virus this year and comparing it to the growth rate from previous years and to kind of boil that down to one number, we were looking at the peak growth rate. So what's the highest growth rate for this year compared to the highest growth rate in previous years? So what we did is we went and found some publicly available data for England going back to the 2011-2012 flu season and we calculated these weekly growth rates and we compared the peak weekly growth rates for this year to previous seasons. The peak growth rate is the moment when a virus is accelerating fastest. Comparing these peak growth rates across different flu strains can give us a sense of how they rank in terms of their ability to spread. When James and his team did this, they found that the new strain had a peak growth rate equal to doubling every seven days. In the last 15 years, there's only been one other flu strain with a higher peak growth rate. That was in the 2014-15 season, which reached a rate of doubling every six and a half days. So that's basically the upper end. It's kind of a top two virus, but it's not unprecedented. So maybe we should be calling it bad flu, not super flu. That seems quite reasonable. James's data is from early in the outbreak. It's not the latest numbers. So there is a chance that the outbreak accelerates again and the growth rate reaches a higher peak. But once you pass the peak and the growth rate, it's quite unusual to see it peak higher later on. And James doesn't think the latest data shows signs of this happening. Do we have any idea when the wave might start to recede? No one's got a crystal ball and infectious disease dynamics are notoriously complex. But James and his team did try to get a sense of how this season might play out by running different scenarios in their model. Basically, in our modeling, we were looking at if you have a virus that starts in the season two weeks to four weeks earlier than normal, and maybe it's a little bit more infectious or has a little bit better ability to evade population immunity, what might the dynamics of that season look like? And we found because of the earlier start, and if things are growing a bit quicker earlier, generally you might expect a peak to happen a bit earlier. Because the main thing that drives the end of a flu season is that enough people get infected and become immune such that the epidemic dies out. So if that's all happening earlier, then you would expect the peak to be a bit earlier. So with that in mind, we thought it's quite plausible that the epidemic might peak in say mid-December rather than going into January because of this early start. So with that in mind, we thought maybe it's likely that we would see a kind of leveling off in the growth rate in these coming weeks in mid-December. And that at the moment seems quite to track with what the data is showing. How many people are likely to get flu this winter then? James Hay again. For H3N2, in a given season, we might expect between 15 and 20% of people to get infected. So 15 to 20% is normal. But given that this season has maybe got a slightly high growth rate, I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were anywhere between 15 to 25%. But if they were getting up to the numbers like 30%, that would probably be quite surprising. So super flu isn't actually super. And the NHS isn't currently facing unprecedented pressure from flu or from other respiratory illnesses. But that doesn't necessarily mean everything's fine. Maybe the NHS is just more fragile than it was in previous waves? Well, there's no one statistic that tells you exactly how well hospitals are faring. But a good indicator is what's happening to the time that ambulances take to hand over patients to hospitals. This gets disrupted when hospitals are struggling to cope. For the week ending the 7th of December, ambulances in England were taking a mean average of about 38 minutes to hand over patients. That's actually better than the same period last year, which was about 44 minutes. And that's even though flu has come early this year. And then we can just compare this to the winter of 2022-23 when the NHS faced massive pressures. Average handover times were much higher and they peaked at about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Thankfully, we are nowhere near that. Thank you, Nathan. And thanks also to Dr James Hay and to friend of the program, Paul Mainwood. Listening to more or less. What prompted all this discussion? The Office for National Statistics has just put some new stats out. But the headline number doesn't always tell the whole story, so we wanted to find out what was behind this spectacular exodus. So I spoke to Madeleine's assumption of the migration observatory at Oxford University. The Conservative politicians have been saying that Britons are leaving the UK because of labour policies. Is there anything we can say to either confirm or refute that claim? These figures don't provide any evidence to suggest that anything particular has changed under the Labour government. The increase in net emigration of British citizens actually took place in 2023. But more broadly, I'm not sure we can look at these figures and assume that government policy is the major driver of people's decisions to emigrate. So it turns out that the recent increase in net emigration of British citizens started before labour came into power. It turns out that Chris Philp has fallen victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well is not looking at the time series data. That said, Madeleine's assumption has some broader concerns about that data. You see, when a Brit decides to move abroad, they don't have to formally register their plans. Unlike an immigrant with a visa to come for a defined period, Brits can come and go as they please. They tend to go and return from holidays a lot to complicate things. The Office for National Statistics has been trialling new ways of capturing when Brits actually moved to or from the UK. But this is challenging. Madeleine again. These figures are very much experimental. There's a new method. I suspect there will be some revisions coming up. And we don't know a huge amount about those people. Some of them will also be previous migrants. There will be people who came to the UK, then became citizens and now are leaving. Looking at data from the UN, we can see that many of these emigrating British citizens are going to places from which the UK has in the past received a lot of inward migration, such as Bangladesh, Poland and Romania. So for all the talk about Dubai and Milan, this suggests a lot of emigration is not for tax reasons, but is either of former immigrants who became UK citizens, but then returned to their country of origin, or of UK-born citizens who are moving overseas because they married someone born overseas. Others will be British-born British citizens who are going to countries, probably the top countries of destination for Brits, which tend to be the English-speaking countries, places like Australia, the US, Canada. And I'm just trying to work out whether we can say anything about the trend here. We can't say anything about the long-term trend because we only have figures with this particular methodology going back to 2021. So the net emigration figures, which suggests more people leaving than arriving to the tune of around, well, over 100,000 per year, those figures look higher than the ones we saw in the 2010s, but it may simply just be because the methodology is very different. We have a consistent time series for the last few years, and what those figures show, although again, I wouldn't be surprised if, as the methods develop, some of those things change a bit. But to the extent we can trust them, those figures show that the increase in net emigration of British citizens took place primarily in 2023 and was stable after that. And the interesting thing about that is actually that the net increase was driven not by more people leaving, but by fewer people coming back, having previously left. Conservative politicians have been criticising the government, but actually this is a trend that continues back under the last Conservative government as well. That's right. And actually, if you look back longer term, it's always been the case that there are more British people leaving than arriving. There's always been negative net migration of British citizens, this obviously being the country that produces Brits. And so to the extent that anyone leaves, that's likely to be a net figure. How much precisely, how much it's changed over time is still very uncertain. And is there any indication that any of this, either under the Labour government or under the previous Conservative government, is driven by government policy? Or can we say anything about why it's happening? That is very tricky. We do know that people emigrating tend to be young people under the age of 35. That in itself is not hugely surprising because migration was really a young people's game. And when people get older, they start to have kids, it just becomes much more difficult, much more of a hassle for them to move around. In terms of the actual reasons, there has been some other research that looks at why people move, including why people from high income countries like the UK move. Often work and study reasons are important, sometimes just the desire to experience something different. And then often what you see is people move maybe just for fun or for a lifestyle change and they get stuck. Sometimes in a good way, right? They might meet a partner or they settle down and they decide, even if they didn't necessarily plan to leave forever, later on they end up staying in the country of destination permanently. Thanks to Madeline's assumption. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, morons. You can hear more from Madeline explaining the immigration stats that we know and would love to know but don't in one of our special stats of the year programs in the first week of January. All week starting on the 5th of January, we're taking over the 9am slot on Radio 4 to explore everything from the cost of living to the weirdness of the weather. You're listening to more or less. You may have heard the prison system has an intriguing and suddenly newsworthy problem accidentally releasing prisoners. First there was Hadrush Kibatu, a former asylum seeker who was imprisoned after being convicted for sexual assault, then accidentally released from prison in October, which as you can imagine didn't go down well with anyone. Then there were other accidental releases. Suddenly it seemed that prisoners were being released by mistake all the time. David Lamme, the Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Justice, was recently quizzed about this on the Today program. I also wanted to ask you about a conversation you had a little earlier with our colleagues on BBC Breakfast when you were talking about the accidental release of prisoners. You said that 12 prisoners had been accidentally released since you made your statement to Parliament on the 11th of November. Now there'd been 91 releases in error in the period between April and November. You described it as being on a downward trajectory but the figures don't necessarily bear that out. If you average them out over that period it looks like the trajectory is exactly the same and it's something that you're supposed to be concentrating on. So are those numbers going down? Well I'm looking at the trend over the course of this year. I've asked Dame Linoa to do an independent review and obviously we will get a recommendations in the spring and we will act on that. But in the meantime I've sent in a digital squad. I've had a performance board across the system. Is it a downward trajectory? Because you said it was but again the numbers don't bear that out. What I meant by that is the trend this year does seem at this stage to be going in the right direction. The trend is on a downward trajectory based on last year's figures but I did say in Parliament there has been a spike. We wanted to play that clip in full so listeners could get a proper idea of the discussion. Also editing clips is now unfashionable at the BBC for some reason. In the light of the controversy over the very public accidental release David Lamy introduced new measures meant to reduce releases in error. So to understand this whole issue I spoke to Cassia Rowland, senior researcher at the Institute for Government. So Cassia just remind us what releases in error are. It's any time when someone gets released from prison at the wrong point so either too early or too late or if they should be sent to another form of detention basically immigration detention before deportation and they aren't. And do we know how common that is? It's not that common as a proportion of everyone who gets released from prison. You know you're talking nearly 50,000 people get released from prison every year and last year we saw 262 releases in error. So it's a small proportion. Like nearly one a day but not many compared to the total number of releases. Exactly. What about the trend? Is this just something that's been happening for years or have releases in error actually been going up? They have been going up a lot in the last couple of years. I think that's probably mostly because we've had all of these different emergency measures in place to manage the prison capacity crisis. So lots of people have been released earlier. The release date has changed and so yes that creates some confusion. Yes it's also become a lot harder to calculate when people are supposed to be released because they've changed the rules that basically say how much of your sentence you need to spend in prison. And it's now... Sorry I've just got visions now. Some poor prison officers are doing kind of difficult GCSE maths questions and getting them wrong and that's why people are being released in error. But that... That is exactly what's happening. Guidance on when people should be released is more than 150 pages and people are doing maths kind of with a pen and paper or a calculator to figure it out. I kind of had had in mind that it was kind of mistaken identity or that sort of thing but it's basically they are letting people out when they plan to let them out but their plans were the wrong plans because they just got so confused by the guidance. It's definitely a combination. So there will be cases where there's say someone has been acquitted of one offence and so should be released but is actually being held waiting for another offence and so they need to be held until that's result and something just gets lost somewhere along the way or the court enters the wrong information and tells the prison that it's a suspended sentence and not an immediate sentence. Those kinds of mistakes do also happen. Now I wanted to talk to you about a claim that the Justice Secretary David Lambie made on the BBC. He said that releases in error seem to be on a downward trajectory and that they were going in the right direction. So what do you make of that claim? I think it really depends on when you're comparing it to. So in the last few weeks and months we've seen fewer releases in error than we saw last year but last year was kind of more than double the next highest figure on record. It's still higher than it was in any previous year and noticeably it hasn't really shown any signs of coming down since the Justice Secretary introduced his new checks. Right so there was a massive spike last year and we are now on a very elevated plateau with no particular sign of progress except it is lower than it was last year. Yes exactly. It's worth saying though that because this includes people who are released late as well as people who are released early it's possible that we're now releasing people late instead of early because we're doing these additional checks that slow things down so much. But that is also bad right? If people are staying in prison they shouldn't be in prison that's bad. It's really bad. Thanks to Cassia Rowland of the Institute for Government. Recently President Trump was hosting a round table with business leaders when he came out with this economic pearl of wisdom. Instead of 4% GDP or 3% which I said so wonderful 3% it should be able to be 20 or 25%. I don't know why it can't be. I do. I asked Justin Wolfers Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan to give us his take. President Trump has said he doesn't see why the US GDP growth rate couldn't be 20 or 25% a year. Do you know why it couldn't be? Well I just think that would be really really hard. We don't have any historical experience that coheres with that. So he's imagining a world. It's a beautiful world but it's very different than the world any of us have ever lived in. Why do you say it's so different? Well for 200 years in a row now the US economy has grown relentlessly at 2% per year. 25 is a lot bigger than 2%. When the US economy is boomed and we've celebrated in the streets the party of an extraordinary economy it's grown at 3 and maybe 4%. So he is imagining a world that is wildly outside any reality any of us have lived through. And if we were to have one of those good years say a 4% growth year what is going on in the economy to make it grow at 4% rather than 2%. Animal spirits are up. Businesses are investing like crazy. Workers are feeling confident so they're happy to keep spending. Folks are building new houses because you feel secure at work you might put an extension on the house as well. And just an enormous amount of confidence that not only is the present a good moment but you feel that there are good times ahead of us and so why not spend, spend, spend? I know President Trump is very interested in what's going on in China and China has grown enormously since the late 1970s. I mean often exceeded GDP growth of 10% a year for an extended period of time so even if we can't reach 20 or 25% couldn't the US economy reach 10% a year? China is an extraordinary story but it's a very different story. It's a story that one sometimes sees with developing countries. Countries that are not at the technological frontier which is where China was a couple of decades ago. When you are not widely developed when you haven't mechanized industrialized used modern technology then the path to economic growth is simply doing what the other guys already did. All the inventions have been invented nor you've got to do is figure out how to adopt them. That's essentially what China's been doing. So it's moving from a long way away from the frontier toward the frontier. That gives you incredible growth and it's not just China. We saw that with many of the East Asian miracle countries as well. The problem for the US is that it is the technological frontier. If we need to grow faster we can't find a bunch of inventions off the shelf that someone else has already invented that are pathways to being more productive. We actually would have to invent them and that is a much slower more difficult grind of a process. Yeah so have there been examples of economies growing at 25% in a single year? There have been. Few and far between but the most important point to note is only for one year in a row. So let me explain when it happens. Basically if you shut an economy down don't let people work or don't let them work in the market and then you open up the next day then you get dramatic growth like that. So we saw growth rates above 25% if I recall in the wake of World War II and we saw growth at that rate but for a much shorter period when many economies reopened after Covid. So it's basically the end of an enormous disruption which is different to what we would hope for is we're in a pretty smooth economy right now and we just moved to a higher plane. Thanks to Justin Wolffers. Finally we were shocked to hear this week that film director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle had died. What does that sad news have to do with more or less you ask? Well loyal listener John Clark could tell you he wrote to us years ago. Have you analyzed the statistical frequency of Princess Bride references in your program? In the current series I would estimate approaching one per episode inconceivable. However it needs the kind of in-depth analysis that only more or less can provide. Unless you've studied your agripper which I have. We are huge fans of Rob Reiner's film The Princess Bride and things escalated to even more inconceivable heights in January 2018 when we interviewed a Spanish vet. My name is Enrique Vega you kill my father prepare to die. Rob Reiner's film The Princess Bride but in his memory maybe it's one to watch over Christmas. That's all we have time for this week. If you want to discover even more about how language and numbers can be used to mislead and bamboozle us check out the Open University's buzzword bingo. To find it search for more or less behind the stats and follow the links to the Open University. Please keep your questions and comments coming in to more or less at bbc.co.uk. We'll be back next week with some faintly Christmasy numbers to explore. Until then, goodbye. More or less was presented by me Tim Harford the producer was Charlotte MacDonald with Tom Coles, Nathan Gower, Lizzie McNeill and Katie Soloveld. The production coordinator was Maria Agundale the program was recorded and mixed by Neil Churchill and our editor is Richard Varden. Hello I'm Sean Farrington presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series Toast which looks at amazing brands that promised a lot yet somehow ended up toast. We're back with another series kicking off with a treat Sir Stephen Fry on his disappointment when the Blackberry smartphones he loved took a turn for the worse. It was badly designed and the haptic click noise was hideous it sounded like a dislocated knuckle. Among our other topics is Skype. Why couldn't it capitalize on the popularity of video calling during the pandemic and a bottled water from Coca-Cola big in the states but it sank here within just six weeks. Listen to toast first on BBC Sands.
