Go figure: how Britain became a nation of armchair statisticians

Sceptics are poring over official figures in the Covid-19 crisis, but not all data deserves to be treated with suspicion

• Coronavirus - latest updates
• See all our coronavirus coverage

The British distrust of numbers goes back centuries. The Tudor authorities burned maths manuscripts in Oxford for being magical and popish. Dr John Dee, later court astrologer to Elizabeth I, was arrested in 1555 on charges of calculating". Florence Nightingale was thought to be a nuisance by generals for counting the soldiers who died in Crimean hospitals, to discover how better to treat them.

Now, we are a nation of armchair statisticians, obsessing over seven-day rolling averages and data transparency, and challenging bad stats whenever they appear.