Data lessons from two years of the covid-19 pandemic

Context: After declaration of the covid as a global pandemic by WHO, various countries set up web-based dashboards for providing covid related data and information to their citizens. However, it was not set-up in India.

India did not set up any web-based data portal. The Union Ministry of Health used to provide daily infection and death numbers state-wise. Apart from the central government also built Aarogya Setu app to track citizens’ movement data during the pandemic.

Volunteer-driven initiative: Due to lack of any government initiative, the covid portal, Covid19india.org was set up.

What problems India faced due to lack of authentic data?

Flawed covid data was used to reinforce the message that everything is fine. For example, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare could provide neither back data for previous days nor a tool to examine trends at a more granular level. The ministry struggled to maintain a regular schedule even for putting out these bare details.

Aarogya Setu proved to be of limited utility, and it only aroused the suspicion of a wary citizenry.

It led to loss of time and energy. It means due to lack of data, much of the ‘covid management’ protocol was diverted for imposing stringent conditions for recording covid deaths. For example, State governments set up audit committees to certify covid deaths.

Poor data result in poor program formulation and implementation. For example, India’s poor covid data resulted in the poor progress in ramping up health infrastructure. It also slowed down the pace of the vaccination programme till the second wave hit us in the spring of 2021?

What are the suggestions to improve India’s data governance?

First pandemic data lesson: “An Open data ecosystem can be literally life-saving”. For example, A geo-tagged database can help epidemiologists to better predict the evolution of the epidemic.

Second pandemic data lesson: When data quality is poor, uncritical use of data in policymaking is fraught with dangers. Therefore, a better quality of data should be generated which is beneficial for policy making

A well-regulated data ecosystem can be built. It can help reap the benefits during a crisis. For instance, the UK’s statistics watchdog, the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), worked to keep the data honest.  An independent and credible watchdog can check the distortion of honest data.

An empowered statistical regulator is the need of an hour in a healthy democracy. He should be answerable to its citizens and Parliament rather than the ruling regime.

Source: The post is based on an article “Data lessons from two years of the covid-19 pandemic” published in the live mint on 14^th March 2022.