2019 in numbers: from lenient prison sentences to Santa school

Here’s a look back at some memorable statistics from swissinfo.ch stories over the past year, including the 20 candles on our birthday cake and the CHF500,000 it takes to raise two children.

January

10

Commit murder in Switzerland and you could be given a life sentence. However, “life” could mean as little as ten years. Why do Swiss judges hand down relatively lenient sentences compared with other countries? 

February

95

Some 95% of mothers breastfeed in Switzerland. But many prejudices still exist about how – and even if – one should breastfeed. 

March

20

SWI swissinfo.ch blew out 20 candles! Discover how much journalism has evolved over the past two decades. 

April

14

Is 14 too young to make a career choice? Students have to make big decisions about their professional futures at a young age in Switzerland. 

May

1,250,000

The Swiss Federal Railways transports 1.25 million people a day, but not all of them know how to behave properly. Do you? 

June

14

On June 14, hundreds of thousands of women across Switzerland took to the streets, demanding equal treatment and conditions as men. The date was no coincidence: on June 14, 1991, half a million women marched for the first “Women’s Strike”. Gender inequality is still widespread in Switzerland. 

July

7,000

Throwing the Fête des Vignerons, a traditional winegrowers’ festival held every 20-25 years in the lakeside town of Vevey, is no small task. Daily two-hour shows feature over 7,000 local actors, singers and musicians – almost all volunteers. 

August

20

Poverty in Switzerland has increased by 20% over the past five years. In one of swissinfo.ch’s most-read stories of the year, a journalist wrote about living on the Swiss minimum subsistence level for a month. 

September

955

The Swiss are iovation champions, filing 955 patents per million inhabitants last year, compared with 332 in Germany and 132 in the United States. In a gallery we present several Swiss inventions that have become design icons. 

October

213,000

Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with cosmologist James Peebles for their work in furthering our understanding of the universe. The two Swiss received around CHF213,000 each. In 1995 they were the first to aounce the discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than our own. In this swissinfo.ch video, Queloz explains what we’ve learnt so far – and what the future might hold. 

November

500,000

Love is priceless, they say. But raising two children in Switzerland costs at least CHF500,000. 

December

220

Swiss-style Santas, known as Samichlauses, go to refresher courses every year to stay at the top of their game. The Santa training courses are run by the St Nicholas Society of the City of Zurich, made up of 220 volunteers.

SWI swissinfo.ch on Instagram

SWI swissinfo.ch on Instagram