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:
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.
Rapid adaptation of data collection, processing and dissemination methods to ensure continuity of key statistical programmes.
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).
Guidance and possible approaches to address managerial and IT challenges for operational continuity during the emergency situation.
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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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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.
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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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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.
Guidance and possible approaches for the production of timely data to monitor the evolution and impacts of COVID-19.
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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.
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.
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.
Resources to support and encourage national statistical offices and other data producers to leverage and use open data.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.