#Throwback: Covid the ultimate game-changer that unexpectedly shook up world of statistics

ON MARCH 2, 2020, en-route to New York, I was scheduled to go to Rome where we were to focus on the Fourth UN Development Decade.

There, as an Oxford research associate and a member of the Oxford Poverty and Human Initiative team, I would have presented on multidimensional poverty measures. But the session in Italy was cancelled as coronavirus reared its head.

Disembarking from SAA at JFK Airport in New York on March 3, 2020, little did I know I would embark on a much shrunk dwarf-like SAA 30 months later heading to Cape Town.

But 30 months ago in New York, everyone was relaxed and, except for a few people, no masks were worn.

Although I am one not shy of feeling odd, at least in my yellow suit, wearing a mask made me feel pretty strange. As soon as I got to my hotel, I took it off and didn’t wear it again on the trip.

In New York, the other bean counters of the world at the UN Statistics Commission (UNSC) seemed unconcerned about the impending danger of Covid as we exchanged pleasantries with handshakes, hugs, and even the Francophone Africa greeting, where the corners of one’s forehead bounce off each other three times. Occasionally, we would do the Chinese greeting adaptation of leg greeting, to much rapturous delight.

The chief statisticians of China and Italy did not attend the UNSC meeting because of the outbreak of the coronavirus in their countries.

We felt secure under the guidance of then-us president Donald Trump’s mighty America. There was little talk of the virus as we went on with our business, but word in the corridors was that the UNSC could be the last face-to-face meeting for a while and the UN Women Session was unlikely to be held face to face, which indeed it was not.

The seven days went fast and, soon ,it was the morning of Saturday, the 7th, and time to head home on SAA.

Upon arrival, South Africa was equally relaxed. On the 10th, I had an appointment at the airport with the University of Zululand to discuss graduation matters, and all was set to happen in May.

That afternoon, I went to present at Workplace in Sandton City and Ashraf Garda was our host. But before we could present, Garda asked Stafford Masie, the CEO of Workspace, to address us.

We recorded what he presented. He said, sounding anxious, that the world would change within days.

He said the session would be the last to be hosted there as they were readying themselves to close for business, not just for that day, but for an indeterminate future.

He said: “We have just been in a global meeting with doctors who are saying they have no clue about what is ravaging the world and people are dying”.

It was a sobering 10-minute rendition. And the penny finally dropped, despite having just been to bustling New York.

Yet, throughout the meetings at the UNSC, we were concerned with matters of measurement, except that of measuring in the context of the coronavirus. Covid, which had started wreaking havoc in China and parts of Europe, was not part of the agenda. Twenty days later, the world, including the US, where we had convened, started closing borders and locking down social and economic activity

Statisticians and ICT experts thought IT was the ultimate gamechanger. Even in their 52nd UNSC session, 10 days from drastic measures that the world would take against Covid-19, statisticians would consider the UN Handbook on Organisation of Statistics Office.

Albeit a radical change of the title is on the offing, which will be the UN

Handbook on the management and organisation of a national statistics system, statisticians were conceiving of IT as the main game-changer.

Little did they realise that Covid19 would be the greatest disruption, demanding major changes in the business process models of the institutions.

The disruption was so severe that it became a health and economic threat and rendered some of the statisticians’ instruments of measurement obsolete, thus demanding that those be changed. Time to #Throwback.

This column consists of excerpts from a Critical Sociology journal article I penned in December 2020, titled “The Murderous Coronavirus: Data and Statistics to Die or to Adapt, But Together – That is the Question.”