Thread by @ArmstrongDrew

Where do Americans get their Covid-19 data from?

This is the inside story of how a group of journalists, optimists, academics and hundreds of volunteers built @COVID19Tracking project to tell the U.S. how the pandemic is evolving.

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

The folks at @COVID19Tracking, including @alexismadrigal @kissane and many others, invited me in to look under the hood, hang out in their Slack, do some data entry, and generally interview anyone I wanted. It was incredibly trusting, and I can't thank everyone there enough.

I'll share here some observations that are in the piece:

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

One thing that really surprised me was the lack of politics/political discourse. The volunteers -- and they're almost all volunteers -- are very, very much about the data and getting the numbers right.

To the extent that there's any lament or anger (and I asked everyone if they had any), it's *incredibly* earnest. They're upset about data-transparency standards. Or about weak IT pipelines between local/state/federal health depts. (And they're mad about it in a v polite way.)

For example, this was a pretty standard answer:

Also, just as an aside, @BW did a bang up job w/ the print art here: bloomberg.com/news/features/…

The other sense you get from talking to the volunteers and volunteers-turned-staff is that this is kind of what the Internet could have been: A bunch of curious, technically competent (or just very willing) people who came together online to build something for the public good.

There are journalists like @alexismadrigal + @yayitsrob, editor-community-tech(ish)-defy description people like @kissane, and then everyone from band tour managers, students, librarians, academics, etc.

And I really cannot emphasize enough the overriding sense of *niceness* that pervades the place. Any conversation w/ somebody who has been there a long time returns, at some point, to the culture they have.

There is, also, a sense of tiredness. These people have been doing this for a while, and keep doing it, but also wonder... why they are still having to:

“We just sort of figured, of course the CDC would put out this information,” Madrigal says. “But it just never happened.”

The CDC actually does *have* much of this info, as does HHS. But it's very hard to find, presented messily, and in some cases kept private for the gov't.

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

It's also pretty clear that CDC wasn't built to respond to a U.S.-wide outbreak of a new disease:

To be fair here -- everyone I've ever spoken to at CDC is 1) very kind, 2) very smart, 3) wants to get this right.

But they don't seem to have the tools in hand or the organization culture to do it.

Anyways, it's been a very fun week for publishing stories about the pandemic that are not just deeply depressing! I coulda written 6,000 words about @COVID19Tracking, but I'm pretty sure @amandakhurley might not have loved that.