Peter Rhodes on musical murders, missing statistics and how we all know more than the experts

In these uncertain times, some things do not change. Consider the latest series of Killing Eve (BBC1) in which, once again, we learn that if you are hiding from a professional assassin, the very best place to be is in a downstairs room in central London with all the lights on and the curtains wide open.

I can't help feeling this series is pushing our credulity just a tad. The killer Villanelle (Jodie Comer) slays two women in quick succession by throwing a tuning fork at them. A sharp, presumably.

A Daily Mail reader says it's incredible that the Government has assembled its Sage committee, comprising some of the world's most eminent scientists, yet Piers Morgan and half of Daily Mail readers seem to know more about epidemiology, civil contingency planning and pandemic response than all of them.

Fair point. I once went to the bar right at the sharp end of a Channel ferry as it came in to Dover where a gaggle of middle-aged male passengers had gathered. It was the strangest thing but every one of those Brits knew more about how to steer a ferry than the captain. And so we berthed to a gentle chorus of: “He ought to go left a bit now, no, right a bit, and he's got too much throttle.” You'll see the same thing at football matches where 20,000 flabby fans know better than a supremely fit and talented £10 million striker what he should do with the ball: “Go wide, you clot, go wide!” Never underestimate the freeborn Englishman's fervent belief that he knows more about anything than anyone else.

Meanwhile, among all the statistics bombarding us daily, one set is missing. Where are the figures showing us your chances of survival in different UK regions and different hospitals? More to the point, how do British victims fare once they are in NHS hospitals, compared with sufferers in the rest of the world? In short, does the NHS give us a better or worse chance of survival than other health systems? Now may not be the right time to release such statistics but when this pandemic is over, we need to be told all the facts, not just the ones we want to hear.

Greta Thunberg has gone very quiet. Maybe the teenage eco-icon has been struck dumb by the speed and effectiveness of this contagion. She believed it might take 12 years for humankind to abandon its gas-guzzling, air-polluting ways. In the event, global aviation is down by 50 per cent and UK car sales by 97 per cent. And all done in a few weeks, not by human intelligence but by a virus which doesn't even have a brain.

Our changing language. A reader asks why these days when a venue is full it is rammed. He asks: “Whatever happened to crammed?” Or for that matter, jammed? And why do they all rhyme?