2.18 Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has had disruptive effects on the production of official statistics worldwide. The disruptions resulted mainly from the need to diminish physical communication and exercise distancing between people to prevent the spreading of the virus. This impacted data collection in many countries that collect their data mainly by visits to households and businesses as surveys had to be cancelled and data collection in the field by enumerators had to be stopped to reduce the risk of contamination. On the other hand, for NSOs and other statistical producers with broad access to administrative data, the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has not been that dramatic on data collection. This shows up one main strength of utilising administrative sources or other innovative data sources for official statistics and underscores the importance of developing administrative records and registers to enable and facilitate their use for statistical purposes.

Apart from the disruptive effects on data collection, the pandemic has hurt the statistical production in many countries, particularly by severing the continuity and regularity of the statistical activities and outputs.

In the NSOs and the other producers of statistics, regular activities were disturbed as staff had to be sent home to carry out their duties by virtual means. This has most likely not had significant effects in well-developed countries with excellent network coverage and ample computer capacity. The effects were strongly felt in NSOs in developing countries with little to spare laptops, limited network connection, and uneven electricity provision. In several countries, statistical budgets were cut due to the pandemic and face-to-face collection of data had to be curtailed, resulting in surveys being much delayed or scrapped altogether. All of this has added to the difficulties of collecting and processing the necessary data to inform COVID-19 response and in the longer-term for the monitoring of the SDG indicators but eventually showing up the great need for providing funds for securing resilient statistical capacity and infrastructure.