8 July 2020
By Wafa Aboul Hosn, Chief of Economic Statistics, and Juraj Riecan, Director of Statistics, Information Society and Technology Cluster, Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia
Data and statistics are no longer the purview of researchers and academics. This has become most evident with the COVID-19 pandemic, as people worldwide are following daily statistics on confirmed cases, deaths, and PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing, and governments put in place policies to contain the spread of the disease among their population.