THERE IS a quote from Nate Silver about statistics which I think is very nice: “The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them, we imbue them with meaning.” You can’t just collect some data and it’ll tell you the answer. There is an art to trying to extract information, knowledge and understanding from data, and even in choosing what data to collect. It’s something we’ve all been dealing with over the past few months with covid-19: can we believe these numbers? What do they mean?