How does the COVID-19 crisis affect durations of peer review and editorial handling? One question we often get on this site in one form or the other is: Is my paper under review (or similar) for too long and if yes, how should I react? Now, suppose I have gone through all the steps to answer this question in a normal situation: I have procured statistics of the journal’s handling or peer-review times, added a fair margin for individual variability, etc. My question is: How should I modify these in lights of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis? I do not want to bother editors more than appropriate.

The obvious thoughts are:


Some reviewers and editors are busy with challenges arising due to the crisis, e.g., due to having to switch to online teaching, having no childcare, etc.
On the other hand, some reviewers and editors now have more time available due to conferences being cancelled, not being able to access their labs, and similar.
Some fields are obviously directly affected by the crisis, in particular medicine, virology, and epidemiology. I am not considering those.


I am only interested in answers that go beyond such obvious thoughts, for example being based on experience as an editor.
The ideal are answers based on statistics, but those likely do not exist yet (but will be welcome when they eventually will).
I am an associate editor for two journals, and although the situation is fairly new, I expect to have no substantive change in the time for me to handle papers.

The reasons for this are:


Pretty much everything is handled purely electronically anyway, so there's no physical interaction to be disrupted.
Reviewing is typically a sparse activity by people who are mostly always overloaded anyway, and it's always fairly low triage for people.  As such, I don't anticipate the availability of reviewers to particularly change: if people have more time, they'll fill it with things more important to them; if people have less time, I'll just have to ask a few more to find a full reviewer set.
The time to review is typically dominated by the time that a manuscript ages quietly on the reviewer's desk before the review deadline arrives --- actually carrying out a review often does not take all that much time, by comparison. The number of weeks we give our reviewers isn't going to change, so that dominating time won't either.
Because of the preceding factors, there's already a lot of stochasticity in time to review. Even if it does go up a bit, I doubt it will be readily detectable against the background of stochasticity.