Challenges to Generating Reliable COVID Statistics: Domestic and International Experience

Abstract

The article discusses specifc issues of the reliability of statistics on the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and the comparability of similar statistics across different countries. All countries faced challenges, regardless of the level of well-being and social system. However, the examples outlined in the article refer mainly to large economies, each of which for at least one year from 1980 to 2019 produced more than 1% of the global GDP. The organization of the health care system in these countries is different, and only the general requirements of WHO could provide information on the spread of the pandemic in comparable formats.The authors formulated the problems of identifying those infected with Covid-19 and mortality statistics, indicating the various impact of the pandemic on deaths. It has been shown that the formal application of the WHO recommendations to the identifcation of infected persons and differences in the practical use of these recommendations in different countries can give poorly comparable results. The example of Russian statistics illustrates that it is possible to compare the operational data on the mortality of those infected with the coronavirus with the data on the total mortality in the country. Attention is drawn to the example of statistics from Germany, demonstrating the possibility of practical overlapping of the excess mortality rate and the operational data on the mortality of those infected with Covid-19.Data on daily increments of infected, dead, and recovered per million people allows one to see the nature and prevalence rate of the pandemic in different countries in a comparable format. The largest single-day increase in coronavirus cases in some countries in 2020–2021 reached 2–3 thousand per 1 million population, while in others – it was less than 30. In most countries under review, daily deaths' peaks amounted to less than 40 cases, but there were other countries for which these peaks did not exceed 10 cases or less per 1 million population.In conclusion, the report identifes six all-cause mortality factors associated with the pandemic and social distancing demands formulated by the American Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. According to the authors, it would be interesting to learn the experts' assessment of how realistic and benefcial it is to know how to keep track of these factors. It would improve the quality of international comparative analysis of socio-demographic indicators.