Covid By Numbers

A clear and extremely readable guided tour of the pandemic… This book represents an extremely timely contribution… If journalists, politicians and the public were all provided with a copy then the debate would be vastly better informed, with much more light than heat

– Oliver Johnson * Guardian *Cuts through the noise and disinformation about the pandemic… In single well-evidenced sentences [Spiegelhalter] and Masters can pronounce on months-long conflicts… Reading it, it feels as though there are adults in the room – Tom Whipple * The Times *Fascinating – Jeremy Vine

A valuable overview of COVID-19 statistics and how to navigate them. Rather than just quoting numbers, Spiegelhalter and Masters discuss how to think about epidemic data… No doubt many books will be written on the COVID-19 pandemic… But if they want to get the statistics straight, their authors may want to read Covid by Numbers first

– Adam Kucharski * Lancet *I couldn’t imagine a better guidebook for making sense of a tragic and momentous time in our lives. Covid by Numbers is comprehensive yet concise, impeccably clear and always humane – Tim Harford, author of How To Make The World Add UpA clear, concise statistical journal of the plague year. If you want to understand the numbers behind the virus that stopped the world, you ought to read this book – Tom Chivers, author of The RationalistsFantastic and wonderfully readable. A much needed antidote to the often murky and misinterpreted world of Covid data, explained in a straightforward and clear way - yet always remembering the humanity the data represents – Dr Hannah Fry

David Spiegelhalter (Author)

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics, has been published in 11 languages. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020.

Anthony Masters (Author)

Dr Anthony Masters is a Chartered Statistician, a Statistical Ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society, and a frequent blogger and explainer of statistical ideas.