”This is like a bushfire. If there is one spark, this thing will catch fire”, says epidemiologist Debby Guha-Sapir about the fact that authorities stopped measles vaccinations due to covid-19. Debby founded the world’s best and most reliable database on natural disasters, EM-DAT, at the university of Louvain, Belgium. Dry numbers can be more contentious than you think: ”We get a lot of hate mails about the fact that our data doesn’t show that disasters are increasing. Nobody wants good news.”