Why do so many news outlets – the BBC in particular – prefer reporting grim worst-case scenarios made by mathematical models to more optimistic real-world data? The Today programme excelled itself again this morning by putting in its lead 8.10am slot a study by UCL and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine into the possible consequences of the Covid-19 epidemic on reopening schools. Many listeners will have picked up on, and gone away with, one simple message: that a second spike of Covid-19 next winter could be twice as large as the first. It feeds into the general paranoia of the past week, in which the Prime Minister and many others have interpreted an uptick in recorded cases of Covid-19 in many European countries as signs of the dreaded ‘second wave’.
The UCL paper,
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