Before working with the COVID Tracking Project, I didn’t realize how much painstaking work went into collecting the kind of data that I often take for granted. When reading news stories about COVID-19 — or, for that matter, about any topic that incorporates data — I’ve never really questioned how data is collected and analyzed to determine trends. But crucial concepts such as the idea of a certain area seeing a “spike” in COVID cases, and the way this is reported in the news media and subsequently responded to by governments and the public, have their basis in the human work of gathering information day by day and comparing it to values from previous days or other locations.
These numbers come to the public (and journalists who write stories using them) ready-made, but the work put in every day at the COVID Tracking Project illustrates how much thought and effort has to go into getting them there. I came away from my shift feeling extremely impressed and awed, not only at the complexity of the task but at the fact that so many people volunteer their time to help. In these truly bleak and difficult times, I was heartened by the way people came together to make this happen.
At the same time, I was struck by the necessity of the project in the first place — that journalists are doing this because the federal government cannot be trusted to accurately report COVID information (or had refused to do so in the past). Even now, after the CDC began reporting state-by-state figures, they often don’t match up with what the COVID Tracking Project found, for unknown reasons. This is a clear demonstration of the importance of journalism as the fourth pillar of democracy and a necessary check on government (especially a government that is openly hostile to silence), and which may try to mislead the public about the reality of COVID-19 infections if not challenged.
Working my shift also allowed me to apply some of the concepts we previously discussed in class, including the limitations of data collection. We could only put in what the state health departments themselves were reporting, and many categories were left blank if a state did not report antibody tests, for example. Furthermore, those state health departments were themselves limited by county health departments, which were limited by who came in to take a test. Thinking this way made the prospect of accurately counting COVID-19 infections and deaths in the US seem even more daunting, but the project at least did what it could with the information it had available.