Pandemic and Data

*This article was first published in Oct 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every one, and data crunchers are not exempt from it. Much of their profession revolves around the belief that it is possible to extract meaningful pattern from observations, which can be used to forecast what is likely to happen in the future.

But that premise broke down with the spread of COVID-19 and the subsequent economic closure. When everything stopped at the same time, so did continuity and predictability.

Since 1955, the monthly unemployment rate in the US has never exceeded 11%, including the immediate aftermath of the 2008–2009 financial crisis. In April 2020, the unemployment rate shot up to 14.7% from 4.4% in the previous month.

2020 also saw a major drop in the oil consumption as much of the world economy came to a lockdown. In the ten-year period from January 2010 to December 2019, the daily oil production grew by 0.13% month by month. In May 2020, the world oil producers pumped out 88.54 million barrels a day, a drop of -11.73% from 100.31 mbpd the previous month.

The changes are also felt in the weather, or to be precise, the weather forecast. As the flights got cancelled en masse, meteorologists around world lost reliable supplies of temperature and wind data that were collected by commercial aircraft.

In a world where old rules no longer apply and the supply of reliable data are under threat, only one thing seems certain; the uncertainty is here to stay.

Sources:

OECD
https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rate.htm

U.S. Energy Information Administration
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/data/browser/#/?v=6&f=M&s=0&start=201001&end=202006&linechart=PAPR_OECD&ctype=linechart&maptype=0

Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02198-4