As the world tackles the spread of COVID-19 and its unprecedented impacts on economies, societies and the environment, we are all stepping into unknown territory. Everybody, from politicians to parents, from newly unemployed workers to nurses, from supermarket cashiers to schoolchildren in front of computer screens, faces great uncertainty. But not everything is unknown. We can arm ourselves with facts to navigate through this uncertainty, guiding decisions and informing plans.

The novel coronavirus pandemic has exacted a heavy toll, with more than 6 million cases worldwide and nearly 400,000 deaths from COVID-19 as of this writing. Much of the world remains on lockdown, adding loss of livelihood and financial suffering to the grave health impacts of the virus.

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Chief Statisticians from across the world are leading the response of National Statistical Systems to the data challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, even in the context of major disruptions in day-to-day statistical operations. Sir Ian Diamond, UK’s National Statistician, shares in an interview how the Office of National Statistics of the United Kingdom is innovating and working together with the family of National Statistic Institutes around the globe to provide timely and reliable data to monitor and contain the spread of the disease and its socio-economic impacts, and to inform the design of effective recovery policies. Here you can find the video recording and a slightly edited transcript of the interview.

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Household surveys play an important role in meeting national data needs.¹ But with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, household survey programmes in many countries have been impacted in different ways. While some countries have started to use telephone and web surveys for their national surveys, many still rely on face-to-face interviews. It is these operations that have been affected the most by the pandemic. Is now the right moment for countries that have been relying on face-to-face interviews to make the switch to telephone interviews, given that the mobile phone penetration is already quite high in most of the countries? Professor Jim Lepkowski of the University of Michigan, a leading expert on survey methodology, shares his thoughts on designing and conducting telephone surveys in a conversation with the UN Statistics Division (UNSD).

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Many organizations around the world are finding themselves in a position of having to decide how to move forward on planned conferences and meetings in the face of the current COVID-19 pandemic. This is the position that colleagues from the United Nations University Institute in Macau found themselves in with the 11th International Development Informatics Association conference (IDIA2020) planned for 25–27 March 2020. The organizing committee considered various options, including cancellation, postponement, or relocation (which was an option at the time), and ultimately decided on the virtual conference format.

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With a substantial number of statisticians not being able to travel and working from home, e-learning is probably the best tool for continued learning and acquiring new skills. Many international agencies, regional training institutes and national statistical offices are providing e-learning courses and other learning materials. This can be difficult to navigate, however, not knowing who provides what. An online gateway was therefore recently launched which is meant to help in navigating available courses: https://www.unsdglearn.org/statistics/. Different agencies are there providing key information of their courses and a link to their own pages where one can register for the course in question.

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oday, cloud computing stands out as a key element of an operatinal continuity and disaster recovery plan for statistical organizations, particularly in the face of the disruption national and global statistical systems caused by the COVID-19 crisis. Due to its reliance on hardware-independent virtualization technology, cloud computing enables organizations to quickly back up data, applications, and even operating systems to a remote data center, and to deploy them to multiple users distributed in many different locations.

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To limit the COVID-19 epidemic, governments in many countries are requiring all or most of their workforce to stay home. For national and international statistical organizations, this raises the prospect of a protracted period of time during which the vast majority of their operations will have to rely on telecommuting arrangements with their staff. This in turn creates huge challenges in order to manage “a very large and sudden spike” in the number of staff needing to work remotely, even for organizations that already have experience supporting a limited number of telecommuters.

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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has created a huge demand for fast data to measure its impact on society. Statistics Denmark, in collaboration with other members of the national statistical system, has been using new data sources and methods to provide faster indicators of development. These Experimental Statistics, whose methodologies are subject to continuous development and are not part of the official statistics production, can nevertheless be of great value when users demand fast, innovative and reliable measures of development. In the context of the COVID-19 situation, they provide valuable information to understand the pandemic’s impact on consumption, industry, employment, transportation, trade, etc. Experimental statistics also serves as supplement to mainstream statistical methods where, due to the COVID-19 situation, the data is uncertain or lacking.

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The Office of National Statistics (ONS) of the United Kingdom has released a provisional analysis of deaths related to COVID-19, as reported on the death certificate, from different ethnic groups in England and Wales. The analysis was prepared using linked census and mortality records on deaths occurring between 2 March and 10 April (reported as of 17 April 2020). While ethnicity is not recorded on death certificates in England and Wales, the researchers linked the deaths involving COVID-19 to the 2011 Census. The 2011 Census data included self-reported ethnicity.

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The international statistics community has continued to work together, in partnership with national statistical offices and systems around the world, to ensure that the best quality data and statistics are available to support decision making during and after the current crisis. In this context, thirty six international organizations have launched, under the aegis of the Committee for the Coordination of Statistical Activities (CCSA), a report entitled “How COVID-19 is changing the world: a statistical perspective”.

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Responding to the need for statistical benchmarks for substantiating the public and private decisions that will be taken in the coming months in response to the COVID-19 crisis, the Institute of National Statistics (INS) of Romania is making available a series of ad-hoc studies measuring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Romanian economy, including rapid estimates for the decreases in economic activity, employment, and exports.

This page contains links to data and information resources provided by international organizations that are part of the global statistical community. It is updated continuously as more resources become available.

Responding to urgent demands for trustworthy, timely and disaggregated data to help policy makers in containing the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigating its social and economic impact, National Statistical Offices around the world are making information resources available to governments, businesses and the public at large. This page is regularly updated with links to COVID-19 resources from national statistical offices. NSOs are invited to contact covid-19.stats@un.org if they would like add to or update the list of links presented for their country.

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No one country or sector can overcome COVID-19 alone: this deadly pandemic requires swift and coordinated multi-stakeholder collaboration and knowledge sharing. Numerous data collaboratives and partnerships are happening beyond the official UN system. The Governance Lab has created a living repository for data collaboratives with the aim to build a responsible infrastructure for data-driven pandemic response.