The COVID Tracking Project was a collaborative volunteer-run effort to track the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. It maintained a daily-updated dataset of state-level information related to the outbreak, including counts of the number of cases, tests, hospitalizations, and deaths, the racial and ethnic demographic breakdowns of cases and deaths, and cases and deaths in long-term care facilities. Data was updated by hand from state health department webpages, press conferences, and outreach to state health officials. The project reported data from all states, the District of Columbia, and five US territories.

History

In early March 2020, two journalists, Robinson Meyer and

Alexis Madrigal Alexis Madrigal (born 1983/84) is an American journalist. He's currently the new co-host of KQED's Forum. In 2010, Madrigal began working for ''The Atlantic''. In 2014, he was promoted to deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com. He joined '' Fusion'' l ...

, started constructing a

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

tracking spreadsheet for their investigation in ''

The Atlantic ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...

'', after not finding a unified official source for testing data in the United States. Around the same time, data scientist

Jeff Hammerbacher Jeff Hammerbacher is a data scientist. He was chief scientist and cofounder at Cloudera and later served on the faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Early life Hammerbacher grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His father worked at th ...

was independently working on a similar tracking spreadsheet, and the COVID Tracking Project was formed when these two projects merged on March 7, 2020, and the public was invited to contribute. Madrigal leads the project, and Erin Kissane joined as its managing editor; Hammerbacher remains an advisor and volunteer. The project eventually grew to about 30 paid staffers and 250-300 active volunteers. Data continued to be entered using a spreadsheet, with an API developed for easier public sharing. It expanded the range of data points it was gathering as they were reported by a majority of states. In May 2020, the CDC released their first dashboard with state-by-state breakdowns of cases and tests. The project published a comparison of the data compiled by the CDC with the data reported by the states. On February 1, 2021, the organization announced that it would cease its data compilation activities and release its final daily update on March 7, 2021, citing the improvement of government COVID-19 data. On July 29, 2021, the

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It con ...

and ''

'' announced that the COVID Tracking Project's archives would become part of the university library's permanent collection.

Impact

The COVID Tracking Project's data and analysis became a definitive source of COVID-19 data for the United States. The data was used in over 80,000 news reports and 1,000 academic articles. Many federal agencies, including the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgi ...

, have cited data from the COVID Tracking Project, as have both the

Trump administration Donald Trump's tenure as the 45th president of the United States began with his inauguration on January 20, 2017, and ended on January 20, 2021. Trump, a Republican from New York City, took office following his Electoral College victory ...

and the

Biden administration Joe Biden's tenure as the 46th president of the United States began with his inauguration on January 20, 2021. Biden, a Democrat from Delaware who previously served as vice president under Barack Obama, took office following his victory ...

. In June 2020, the CDC released a report stating that The COVID Tracking Project's race and ethnicity data may be more complete than the agency's dataset. The

Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is a committee within the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that provides advice and guidance on effective control of vaccine-preventable diseases in the U.S. c ...

used the project's long-term care data to inform its phased vaccine allocation recommendations. The COVID Tracking Project received multiple awards for its work, including a Sigma Delta Chi Award for Specialized Journalism Site, a Sigma Award for Data Journalism, and a

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

American Journalism Online Award for Best Data Visualization.

History

Impact

References

External links