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Ensuring continuity

About this website

This website provides a space for the global statistical community to share guidance, actions, tools and best practices to ensure the operational continuity of data programmes by National Statistical Offices, and to address issues of open and timely access to critical data needed by governments and all sectors of society to respond to the global COVID-19 crisis.

Ensuring continuity

Rapid adaptation of data collection, processing and dissemination methods to ensure continuity of key statistical programmes.
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Working remotely

Guidance and possible approaches to address managerial and IT challenges for operational continuity during the emergency situation.
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Data solutions

Guidance and possible approaches for the production of timely data to monitor the evolution and impacts of COVID-19.
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Open data

Resources to support and encourage national statistical offices and other data producers to leverage and use open data.
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Useful links

Initiatives and resources provided by agencies of the UN system and beyond, including the regional economic and social commissions and stakeholders from private sector, academia, and civil society.
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Share experiences

Online webinars and twitter chats to share knowledge and experience on how the statsitical system can respond to the COVID-19 emergency.
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Background

The global COVID-19 crisis is affecting critical operations across the entire global statistical system. National and international statistical organizations need to take immediate action to ensure the continuity of key statistical compilation activities and the continued availability of data to inform emergency mitigation actions by governments and all sectors of society.

Senior management in statistical organizations are working together with their own front-line managers and IT teams, and with partners at the national and global levels, to deal with the current emergency. This includes:

  • Establishing new procedures and workflows, collaborating in virtual teams, and implementing secure remote data access and data exchange capabilities for staff members of National Statistical Offices, providers of data inputs and the users of statistical outputs to remain effectively linked together throughout the statistical value chain.
  • Adapting and innovating data production methods and processes to ensure continuity of major official statistical programmes
  • Addressing the increased need for data openness and accessibility to meet the urgent demand for reliable and accurate information on the spreading and impact of the virus as well as its impact on people’s lives and all sectors of the economy.

Stakeholders from across the global statistical community are ready to support National Statistical Offices to address multiple challenges of the current crisis. As part of this effort, the United Nations Statistics Division is leading a collaborative effort with the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and Open Data Watch, to develop this website to share guidance, best practices, information resources and tools to help statistical organizations function during an emergency situation in which most of their staff is suddenly unable to work on-site.

Ensuring continuity

Rapid adaptation of data collection, processing and dissemination methods to ensure continuity of key statistical programmes.

Six United Nations offices work together to support countries in managing the COVID-19 pandemic

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.

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COVID-19 widens gulf of global data inequality, while national statistical offices step up to meet new data demands

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.

Interview with Sir Ian Diamond, National Statistician of the United Kingdom

This article is also available in Russian

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.

Using telephone interview for household surveys: A conversation with Prof. Jim Lepkowski

This article is also available in Russian

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).

Working remotely

Guidance and possible approaches to address managerial and IT challenges for operational continuity during the emergency situation.

Conferencing in the times of COVID-19

This article is also available in Russian

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.

Statistics e-learning

This article is also available in Russian.

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.

Cloud computing for operational continuity and disaster recovery

This article is also available in Russian

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.

Telecommuting arrangements for operational continuity

This article is also available in Russian.

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.

Data solutions

Guidance and possible approaches for the production of timely data to monitor the evolution and impacts of COVID-19.

Using experimental statistics to monitor of the impact of COVID-19 in Denmark

This article is also available in Russian

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.

COVID-19 related deaths by ethnic group in England and Wales

This article is also available in Russian

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.

How Covid-19 is changing the world: a statistical perspective

This article is also available in Russian

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”.

Measuring the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis in Romania

This article is also available in Russian

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.

Useful links

Initiatives and resources provided by agencies of the UN system and beyond, including the regional economic and social commissions and stakeholders from private sector, academia, and civil society.

COVID-19 Resources from international organisations

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.

COVID-19 Resources from National Statistical Offices

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.

Call for action: COVID-19 data collaboratives

This article is also available in Russian

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.

Open data

Resources to support and encourage national statistical offices and other data producers to leverage and use open data.

Humanitarian Data Exchange: Making data accessible for the COVID-19 pandemic

This article is also available in Russian

Access to open, interoperable and timely data about the COVID-19 pandemic is critical for understanding how the virus is spreading and the best strategies for responding in different contexts. To help, we have created a dedicated page on the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform so that our community can find COVID-19 related data from many sources and covering multiple countries.

Launch of the UN COVID-19 Data Hub

This article is also available in Russian

National governments across the globe and the global development community are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic with unprecedented measures. Though capacities in fighting the outbreak across nations vary significantly, all countries need to rely heavily on the availability of geographically disaggregated data in key thematic areas and for various groups of the population. As an immediate first step in addressing these data needs, the Statistics Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs has identified four thematic areas, namely: (1) virus tracking, (2) population, (3) health infrastructure and (4) economy. These data sets will help in mapping the spread of the disease, understanding trends, identifying vulnerable population groups, as well as measuring the economic impact of the pandemic. Ultimately, the aim is to provide access to trustworthy information and to help communicate clear messages so decision makers can address the outbreak effectively and efficiently.

Publish existing data following open data guidelines

This article is also available in Russian

Identifying existing datasets for priority dissemination is the first step to leveraging open data for action during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than focus on collecting new data, national statistical offices should locate existing useful data from traditional and non-traditional sources and publish them while adhering to open data standards to maximize access and usability. This section identifies resources to understand the state of open statistical data in a country, examples of data published by others that are critical to understanding COVID-19, and initiatives underway that use data to stop the pandemic.

Disseminate and incentivize data use

This article is also available in Russian

National statistical offices need to focus on disseminating open data in a way that facilitates and incentivizes data use to contribute to the fight against the pandemic. National statistical offices should provide data on health resources and monitoring efforts using well-designed websites or data portals that are easy to find and navigate, include data visualizations, and provide a variety of download formats. The resources below provide guidance on disseminating and incentivizing the use of data.