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 I would have presented on multidimensional poverty measures as an Oxford Research Associate and a member of the Oxford Poverty and Human Initiative team. 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, there were literally no masks being worn.
Although I am one not shy of feeling odd, at least in my yellow suit, I felt strange wearing a mask, it made me feel pretty strange. So as soon as I got to my hotel, I took it off and didn’t wear it again on that trip.
In New York the other bean counters of the world at the United Nations Statistics Commission (UNSC) seemed unconcerned about the impending danger of Covid as we exchanged pleasantries with hand shakes, 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.
This as the Chief Statisticians of China and Italy did not attend UNSC because of the outbreak of coronavirus in their countries.
We felt completely secure under the guidance of then US president Donald Trump’s mighty America.
There was little talk about the virus as we went on with our business, but the 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 very 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 and all was reassured.
The afternoon I went to present at Workplace in Sandton City, South Africa, 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 within days the world would change. This included the session I was presenting on, which he said 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 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 that information technology was the ultimate game changer. Even in their 52nd UNSC session 10 days from the 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 information technology as the main game changer.
Little did they realize that Covid-19 would be the greatest disruption demanding major changes in the business process models of these institutions.
The disruption was so severe that it did not only become a health threat and an economic threat, but it 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.
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