COVID-19 Data Tracking Pioneers

Description

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center's presents the "Pandemic Data Initiative Expert Forum: COVID-19 Data Pioneers" with leaders in the fight for high-quality public data on COVID-19, including those responsible for efforts at the New York Times, The Atlantic's COVID Tracking Project, and the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard.

An email reminder with the link to the live broadcast will be sent prior to the forum, but the forum can also be accessed directly online.

The Coronavirus Resource Center (CRC) launched the Pandemic Data Initiative as a new resource to spotlight systemic deficiencies in the collecting and reporting of pandemic data, to examine how those challenges hinder COVID-19 responses, and to explore possible solutions to improve public data.

The CRC is a continuously updated source of COVID-19 data and expert guidance. Experts aggregate and analyze the best data available on COVID-19—including cases, testing and contact tracing and vaccines—to help the public, policymakers and healthcare professionals worldwide respond to the pandemic. We organize these forums as another avenue to inform the public and policymakers on COVID-19 data to inform planning and decision-making.

The Pandemic Data Initiative Expert Forum: COVID-19 Data Pioneers will feature four special guests who have led efforts to collect, analyze, and disseminate high-quality data regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in the midst of federal confusion, state disagreement, and public panic.

These panelists were pioneers in collecting and visualizing pandemic data from public health agencies since SARS-CoV-2 first began to emerge in January 2020. Yet despite their 20 months of hour-by-hour updating, they all remain just as shocked today as they were at the pandemic's start at how poorly the government manages vital public health data. While each organization's public-facing digital displays of COVID-19 data present clear and well-organized information, the raw data underpinning those visualizations has been anything other than uniform, standardized, or consistent.

In short, as Blauer and her colleague wrote in a New York Times op-ed, "The data is a mess." We'll explore how they made sense of the mess and what lessons they learned on how to clean up a mess we can't afford to ignore lest a new pandemic or other major public health crisis emerges that we could more quickly combat with real time intelligence informing major policy decisions.

Lauren Gardner and her team at the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University built the COVID-19 global tracking map in January 2020, creating the most comprehensive publicly available data set on the pandemic. Gardner's data drives much of the CRC's analysis and serves as a vital resource for millions of users to track the pandemic.

Archie Tse is the graphics director of the New York Times, where he helped to build and lead a team of about 150 journalists who have been tracking key indicators of the pandemic since January 2020. The effort was a central part of the Times' coverage that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a cofounder of the COVID Tracking Project. He is also the author of The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic's weekly email newsletter on climate change. In 2020, Bloomberg Businessweek named Meyer and the COVID Tracking Project team to the Bloomberg 50, a list of "the people who defined an unprecedented year."

Ian Hodgson is a data reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, covering health and environment. He has reported on COVID-19 since June 2021. Hodgson's work has appeared in the Tampa Bay Times, Frontline, and Univision, among others.