Where did America's Covid data come from?

Policy Punchline just released our interview with Robinson Meyer, a journalist at The Atlantic and co-founder of The COVID Tracking Project, a leading aggregator of Covid-19 data nationwide. Very rarely do we get to talk to someone who understands data, journalism, and politics. The email below is co-authored with Sully Meyer and Neal Reddy, who interviewed Rob with me.

The CDC’s amazing failure 

The interview started with Rob introducing the “herculean” effort by his team to found the Project – which eventually stumbled into superseding one of the CDC’s primary functions while the agency floundered in early March. Everyone says the government screwed up, but how exactly? 

What Rob told us was quite shocking. For the past few months, we’ve all been getting updates about case counts from platforms like The COVID Tracking Project, Johns Hopkins, and NYTimes. You’d think that they were all going off of some CDC database, but no. At the beginning of the outbreak, CDC and the federal government weren’t collecting data (from testing results to case counts) from individual states and releasing them, and there just wasn’t a centralized database where anyone could know how Covid was unfolding. 

Essentially, Rob, along with three other friends, decided to cold-email public health officials in every state and ask them to provide Covid data. There were also dramatic inconsistencies between each state’s definition for certain statistics like positivity rate and how the data were published. Guess where the virus data in Hawaii was first released every day? The Instagram story of the Lt. Gov of Hawaii. Yep – that’s how insane this is. 

They put together a Google Doc and found volunteers to scrape the Internet for data, and that’s how the Project was born. Three guys and a girl in their 20s, none of whom have a data science or public health background (Rob majored in Music at Northwestern) were essentially sending out data that everyone used as the benchmark. 

They had the suspicion all along that they must’ve been under-collecting data and that the federal government had much more complete information over the pandemic which they had kept classified. But one day Rob turned on the TV to watch a White House press conference and saw strikingly similar charts compared to what his team had. So, it turns out that the federal government didn’t really know better… 

It’s hard to fathom how any of this is possible. It’s as if you call up the Federal Reserve and they tell you that they just forgot to collect the GDP and unemployment data from 15 states for the past quarter – you’d probably recommend that the people responsible find a new career. 

Age of big data or “age of noise”? 

One of my friends said none of the above is surprising, and he gave the example of the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm accident as an example of the government's failure. Well, that was a different time, right? We now live in the age of great technology and big data! 

But our response to Covid has probably provided a resounding rejection to that hypothesis. Sure, we’re in the age of big data, but you might as well call it the “age of noise” where it’s increasingly harder to properly contextualize data in policy making while convincing the country of your decision. The political institution has also become more polarized and less effective, which might have essentially counteracted any improvement in state capacity at large (a point that we’ll discuss in our next email). 

This is truly a great paradox – the government has so much surveillance data on citizens, yet they can’t even get the most basic testing data collected; the access to information is easier than ever, but nobody can settle on one (or even a couple) version of truths based on the data we have. 

All this led us to a more existential question: what does this crisis indicate about America’s ability to respond to the unthinkable?

We don’t solve crises; we just manage through them

People often talk about addressing problems through massive, one-time pieces of legislation, as if crises are conquered in one fell swoop of aggressive federal policy. Rob argues, however, that the federal government’s process for addressing crises is less about sweeping master plans and more about management. 

For instance, the government  didn’t plan out every minute policy that would claw the country out of the Great Depression. Rather, it threw a bunch of policies against the wall and monitored which ones stuck. Many of those policies didn’t even resemble their current forms. As journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out, it took 20 years for Social Security to be expanded to large parts of the population and 20 more for benefits to be cost-adjusted. 

Similarly, the CARES Act wasn’t a scalpel, but a sledgehammer with an anvil duct-taped to the end of it. Congress threw $2 trillion at the economy; some of it worked okay, like PPP (Paycheck Protection Program), and some of it excelled, like UI (unemployment insurance). The same is true for America’s response to every problem, from World War II to Civil Rights to climate change. Even if the Green New Deal is passed down the road, don’t expect it to be a silver bullet. The U.S. will be making policy to mitigate climate change for decades to come. 

That may be a bleak outlook, especially considering the current state of debate surrounding climate. But Rob cautioned us to not get bogged down in the abstract question of whether we are pessimistic or optimistic. To him, it doesn’t matter. As long as COVID-19, climate change, or any other issue is worth fighting, it hardly matters what our projection for the future is. The only thing that matters is putting our head down and getting to work.

Learn more about Rob’s work

While Rob’s main beat as of late has been the Covid-19 pandemic, he has been The Atlantic’s chief climate report for much longer. In fact, just this year, he launched Weekly Planet, The Atlantic’s hub for climate commentary and reporting. We encourage you to follow him on Twitter, subscribe to his newsletter, and continue to learn more about these important issues!

Tiger GaoComment