The COVID-19 crisis has shaken the world. The authors of this blog post have edited a special issue of the International Journal on Law in Context (IJLC) that is specifically interested in the role of indicators in the COVID-19 crisis. These contributions follow up from prior research that address different types of indicators from a socio-legal perspective (some of it also published in the IJLC). In the present case, the most obvious indicators are the infection and fatality rates, for example collected by the World Health Organization. There are also various indicators about the health care capacities of countries, government responses, as well as combined ranked indicators. Finally, the start of the vaccinations has been accompanied by data that compare and rank countries, possibly also reflecting variations in government effectiveness.

The contributions of the special issue cover the many roles these type of COVID-related indicators play. To set the scene, Marta Infantino presents an overview of different types of COVID-19 related indicators, while also discussing the hazards and fallacies associated with global attempts to frame the social world in numbers. This is followed by two historical articles: first, by Nathan Genicot on health indicators and the history of international public health management, and second by Manjari Mahajan on the 2019 Global Health Security Index that was just published prior the COVID pandemic. The two next contributions focus on the comparative dimension of COVID-related indicators: David Nelken discusses the problem of indicators to compare and rank the relative performance of states or other units, and Mathias Siems develops a general causal scheme of indicators and their underlying real-world phenomena in the COVID crisis. Finally, John Harrington specifically addresses the contest over health governance and sovereignty in countries of the Global South, and David Restrepo Amariles investigates the data life cycle of contact tracing apps in the pandemic as well as its socio-legal implications.

At the moment, it is possible, but by no means certain, that COVID-19 will be history in the near future. There are also reasons why the impact of the use of indicators in the COVID-19 crisis is likely to remain relevant. A key issue is what the experience from the COVID-19 crisis may tell us about the success in dealing with indicators. It may be argued that some of the countries which have fared well in the pandemic have been the ones which, for example, were quick in their policy reactions and were the able to contain the virus through the contact tracing and other means (e.g., Taiwan, South Korea). However, it is also clear that any country’s reaction to COVID-19 did not happen independently of other country characteristics, for example, degrees of state capacity and trust. Thus, it may also be argued that, despite the global nature of the pandemic, COVID-19 is also case study showing that the context of a country has often made all the difference.

David Nelken, King’s College London, and Mathias Siems, European University Institute and Durham University, are guest editor of a new special issue of International Journal of Law in Context on Numbers in an Emergency:  The Many Roles of Indicators in the COVID-19 Crisis. The issue is available without charge until 5 July 2021.