COVID Tracking Project

The COVID Tracking Project is a collaborative volunteer-run effort to track the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. It maintains a regularly updated database of a variety of types of state-level information related to the outbreak, including counts of the number of positive and negative test results obtained in each state, hospitalization and outcome data for cases, and the racial and ethnic demographic breakdowns of cases and deaths.[2][3]

COVID Tracking Project
Type of site
Collaborative volunteer-run effort
Created byAlexis Madrigal
EditorErin Kissane
Key peopleRobinson Meyer, Jeff Hammerbacher[1]
URLcovidtracking.com
LaunchedMarch 7, 2020 (2020-03-07)
Current statusActive
Content license
Data and website content is published under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Data is updated by hand from "state health departments, local news reports and live news conferences", according to The New York Times.[4] The project reports data from all states, the District of Columbia, and five US territories.

History

In early March 2020, two journalists, Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, started constructing a COVID-19 tracking spreadsheet for their investigation in The Atlantic, after not finding a unified official source for case data with daily updates. Around the same time, data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher was independently working on a similar tracking spreadsheet, and the COVID Tracking Project was formed when these two projects merged on March 7, 2020. They invited the public to contribute, and most aspects of the project are organized and run by teams of volunteers. Madrigal leads the project, and Erin Kissane joined as its managing editor; Hammerbacher remains an advisor and volunteer.[5]

The project continued to be developed as a shared spreadsheet, with an API for easier reuse by other tools. It expanded the range of data points it was gathering as they were reported by a majority of states. In May 2020, the CDC released for the first time their own dashboard with state-by-state breakdowns of cases and tests. The project published a comparison of the data compiled by the CDC with the data reported by the states.[6]

On February 1, 2021, the organization announced that it would cease its data compilation activities and release its final daily update on March 7, 2021.[7]

References
  2. Jin, Beatrice (March 16, 2020). "How many coronavirus cases have been found in each U.S. state". Politico. Retrieved March 30, 2020.
  3. Sohn, Emily (March 24, 2020). "How the COVID Tracking Project fills the public health data gap". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved March 30, 2020.
  4. Buchanan, Larry; Lai, K. K. Rebecca; McCann, Allison (March 17, 2020). "U.S. Lags in Coronavirus Testing After Slow Response to Outbreak". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved March 30, 2020.
  5. "About The COVID Tracking Project". The COVID Tracking Project. Retrieved March 30, 2020.
  6. Madrigal, Robinson Meyer, Alexis C. (May 17, 2020). "State and Federal Data on COVID-19 Testing Don't Match Up". The Atlantic. Retrieved May 19, 2020.
  7. "Analysis & updates | It's Time: The COVID Tracking Project Will Soon Come to an End". The COVID Tracking Project. Retrieved February 3, 2021.
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