How Four Young Journalists Outdid the CDC and Assembled America's Only Covid Dataset
Robinson Meyer is a staff writer and climate reporter at The Atlantic. After covering working on environmental policy and climate change for the last four years of his six years at the publication, Rob and a few of his colleagues at The Atlantic started the COVID Tracking Project in the early days of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, accumulating case counts and death tolls when information on the virus was scarce. The COVID Tracking Project has now grown into being a leading data aggregator for the general public, other news organizations, and local, state, and even federal government-affiliated groups. Rob also is the author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet.
Rob describes the somewhat accidental realization of the COVID Tracking Project and the challenges of its early days. He talks about how the virus spread undetected, and how his team at The Atlantic started from scratch in constructing a network to understand the virus – starting with their collaboration with the Seattle Flu Project, and eventually evolving into a massive effort in collecting and visualizing the shocking data on the community spread that had occurred in the U.S. for weeks.
Rob, Tiger, Neal, and Sully then discuss the implications of the data, including the questions of contextualization and politicization of scientific data with the coronavirus. For instance, what editorial decisions does the Project make in publishing and displaying certain forms of data when there is so much inconsistency in reporting across states? Rob mentions the problems with the positivity rate as a statistic, and how this data point can easily be manipulated.
The interview then shifts to the cultural and political sphere of the pandemic from the perspective of media narratives. Rob discusses the problems in management stemming from the White House, the lack of adaptability from the CDC and American public health establishment figures, and how that arrogance may have hindered the initial response and left the country off-guard.
At its core, they find the narrative collapse surrounding the COVID response originated as much from Congress as the White House, as Rob explains that the money from the CARES act was integral to a collective response in the spring. The current failure of Congress to make a deal is thus preventing us from entering an endgame strategy, in which public health measures attempt to protect as many people as possible before vaccine immunity becomes widespread.
In the closing minutes of the interview, they then shift to a broader conversation on America’s ability to confront existential challenges. Rob, who also runs The Atlantic’s climate outlet “Planet,” asserts that America never truly solves existential problems; it just manages its way through them. In the case of COVID, America chose to manage the crisis by fast tracking vaccine development, leading to a very different outcome than European and East Asian countries had. We chose that route because we had a largely pre-fabricated vaccine plan, but none for masks or social distancing. Here, Rob makes a key point: our response to an existential crisis is as good as the plans we make to prepare for them.
They end on an important, if disheartening question: How will America remember COVID, and is the country capable of normalizing and ignoring even worse disasters? In short, Rob thinks it is possible, but, even so, he doesn’t believe there is room for pessimism. “If you think that climate change is worth fighting and worth pressing against, then it doesn’t matter if you’re optimistic or pessimistic.” While America’s political system is dysfunctional, the government is not. America, through both the private and public spheres, has a huge capacity for public good. For both COVID and climate, the challenge is not creating new institutions or revolutionizing old ones, but directing the capacity we have to minimize the damage.
Robinson Meyer, Staff Writer at The Atlantic and co-founder of The COVID Tracking Project