Understanding exactly how coronavirus is affecting us is the hardest job we’ve ever had

The work statisticians are doing to track the virus requires handling daily data collection – an approach that would have seemed truly radical only a couple of months ago, writes Sir David Norgrove

Statisticians are working with data from death certifiicates, which can be issued up to four days after life ends (AFP/Getty)

Sick people, and those who care for them, struggle with Covid-19 in a very direct way, but all of us are struggling with this pandemic in different ways – and all of us want to understand it better.

This is where statisticians come into their own. Following in the footsteps of Florence Nightingale, the pioneering nurse and statistician whose 200th birthday we celebrated last week, analysts in the Office for National Statistics and across the Government Statistical Service are helping to make sense of what the virus is doing to us most directly, in terms of mortality.

This isn’t easy or as quick as we would like. The most comprehensive data on deaths come from death certificates, but deaths take an average of four days to be registered.