The COVID Tracking Project Part 1

From the Centre for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. It's 2008 and Jessica Melade Rivera's friends all think she's a spy or some kind of secret agent. I was not a spy. I kept trying to say, like, guys, I'm just a nerd that works at a university on a really, really dorky but important project. She's living in DC. She leaves early every morning and comes home late at night. She speaks multiple languages, Arabic, Spanish, English and some Portuguese, and she can't talk about what she does during the day. Jessica's working on something called Project Argus. Project Argus was named after Argus, the 100-eyed giant in Greek mythology, the one who can see all things. Project Argus is at Georgetown University, and its main clients are the intelligence community and the Department of Defense. Our job at Project Argus was to track and identify these early warnings of emerging infectious disease outbreaks, and my colleagues and I covered about 50 different languages. And every morning we would read new sources from all over the world looking for keywords like overwhelmed hospitals or mass hysteria. They're trying to stop the next epidemic from happening. In 2009, they began noticing strange activity on a pig farm in Mexico and reports of an influenza-like illness among the farmers there. And it escalated quite quickly. There were a number of animals, you know, sick pigs on a farm and farmers that were sick too. And by piecing these kinds of clues together, we alerted them that something was happening in central Mexico. That something turns out to be swine flu, also known as H1N1. They move faster than the World Health Organization, identifying the first cases of swine flu in 42 countries. We begin with swine flu. Now widespread in 46. This is ground zero in the swine flu outbreak. La Gloria, a remote Mexican farming village at the border. It's been spread to the U.S. with more than 13,000 cases and more than 25 deaths. In five months, it's become the world's dominant flu strain. Infections have been reported in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Israel, Spain, and the United States. Jessica and the Project Argus team help alert the world to the dangers of swine flu, and the early warning helps slow it spread. But then in 2013, the federal government pulls the funding for Project Argus. Jessica and her colleagues feel like the country is more vulnerable as a result. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. It was like a matter of time for the next global pandemic. If you're not being Argus with 100 eyes looking all over for emerging threats, you're not going to see it until it hits you in the face. COVID-19 has spread to more than two dozen countries. We're deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction. In anyone who shows symptoms of the illness will not be allowed on the plane. We can't slow down the numbers. The trajectory is continuing to go up. The breaking news stay at home. That is the order tonight from four state governors as the coronavirus pandemic spreads. New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut all ordering non-essential employees to stay home. It's been three years since the pandemic shut the country down. More than a million people have died from COVID in the U.S. alone. If you just slow down to think about that number, it's devastating. And the thing is, it didn't have to be this bad. If we had real accurate public health data, we could have saved lives. The U.S. accounts for just 4% of the world's population, but 16% of the world's known COVID deaths. Our growing frustration this morning over the shortage of coronavirus tests in the United States, not enough test kits are available to local medical centers. There is clearly a lack of information. The fight against pandemics is one and lost with data, because in the simplest terms, if you know who's sick, you can isolate them and treat them. With so few tests here in elsewhere, knowing the actual number of infected people, not just the people who have died, but the actual number of people infected, that's impossible right now, because there's just not enough tests, not enough people have been tested. And as the pandemic spiraled out of control, Jessica kept waiting for the federal government to step in. I just kept thinking, where is the CDC? They weren't releasing numbers about how many people were sick or hospitalized or dead from the virus. And I finally got to the point where I was like, if they're not going to provide the information, then who is? Jessica was looking for answers, and she wasn't alone. That's how she linked up with a group of scrappy volunteers who banded together to collect COVID-19 data on their own. They called themselves the COVID Tracking Project. They built unlikely alliances with government insiders, and became the nation's trusted COVID data resource, relied upon by the White House, the Biden campaign, and newsrooms across the US. We partnered with members of the COVID Tracking Project to investigate the federal government's response to COVID, and to understand America's ability to combat the next pandemic. Epidemiologist Jessica Melotti Rivera will be our guide throughout this series. It's late February 2020. Rob Meyer and Alexis Magigal are working as reporters at the Atlantic. They're following the news about COVID coming out of China, and they both have this sinking feeling that it's worse than the Trump administration is letting on. So Rob and Alexis start texting articles to each other constantly. The real moment that I remember being like, oh, like this is coming for us. Rob must have sent it to me or I came upon it, a guy named Trevor Bedford, a genomic epidemiologist. Alexis texts Rob immediately. I was just like texting with Alexis about this thread. I even remember where I was when I read that blog post. I had just done some yoga, and I was lying on my yoga mat. I was getting the shower. I pay my phone. I see it. I read it. The shower was running, and I was like about to get in the shower. And I was just like, oh. Alexis and Rob are frozen in place, reading the thread. So Trevor Bedford, he tweeted, the team at the Seattle flu study has sequenced the genome. The COVID-19 community case reported yesterday from Sonoma County, Washington, and have posted the sequence publicly. Here's the gist of what they found so terrifying. The tweet said that the first case of COVID in the US was reported in Seattle on January 19th. It was a person who had just come back from China. Six weeks later, another person in Sonoma County just outside of Seattle tests positive. There are some enormous implications here. Rob's reading from Bedford's tweets. This case, W-A-2, is on a branch in the evolutionary tree that they want to know. Are these two cases linked? The first reported case in the USA, which was sample January 19th. They discovered that the recent case is genetically related to the first one in January. He said this strongly suggests there has been cryptic transmission in Washington state for the past six weeks. Which means that COVID has likely been spreading in the US for six weeks, undetected. And basically what he showed was that SARS-CoV-2 was like everywhere. It was not just that the CDC was a few days late setting up big testing sites in Seattle. It was that the CDC was six weeks late, understanding the entire spread of the pandemic in the United States. And we had no idea how many people were infected. There were just undoubtedly tens of thousands of more people who were already infected and we were just waiting to find out. Alexis's first thought is to warn his family and friends that the virus is here and it's deadly. That was probably the hardest time for me, I would say. That was the only time during all this when I was crying on a regular basis. In part because I couldn't get people to listen to me. My parents were still, my dad was still going to work. You were still going to the club and I was like, "Dad, stop!" And I finally, it was the only time I ever yelled at my parents too. I was like, "Stop! You've got to stop! You don't know where this is going to hit." It's a Monday morning in early March and everything feels heavier. Rob Wux to work through Northwest DC taking his usual route to the Watergate Building, where the Atlantic's office is. He's not even sure he should be going in anymore. He sits down at his desk and sends a message to Alexis. I slapped him on March 2, 2020 and was like, "Dude, we should really write some big sweeping corona takes. People do not get it with not in all caps." And he was like, "I've spent all weekend off about this." And I actually first proposed to Alexis that we just look at the public reporting and say, "This is a huge emergency. The Trump administration is completely blowing this." And the Atlantic's response was, "You can't write that. It's not just about attacking the Trump administration. You need to publish a new reporting." They're both frustrated. Alexis needs to vent. So he types up a message. And I said, meaning to DM Rob, that I felt like the Atlantic editors were not seeing the gravity of the situation. But possibly with like slightly cruder language all throughout. It's the kind of venting you do with your friends, but definitely not your bosses. He means to send the message privately to Rob on the Atlantic Slack, but Alexis accidentally sends it to everyone at the Atlantic Newsroom. Oh, it was the worst. I mean, I mean, when I hit Enter and realized what had happened, I was. It was pretty bad. At that point, I just was like, "Well, I guess I got to double down. It's not like I kind of race and pretend it didn't happen." So I doubled down and said, "Listen, I didn't mean to post that here. And I didn't mean to put it in quite these terms, but we're not responding to this as like the crisis that it is." So my feeling was if the Atlantic wasn't going to let us write a piece about how bad things were. We needed to do our best to find a piece of information that would let people understand how bad it actually was. The next day, they cycle through every tweet and web page from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They listen to press conferences and webinars about public health, and they can't find anything that might sway their editors about the urgency of the COVID situation. Then, Alexis notices something strange on the CDC website. Alexis is like, "The CDC has really changed how they're reporting the statistics. They'll add some numbers, then they'll drop them, then they went to having the minimum amount of information." Rob decides to tune into a CDC press conference to see if they say anything about why the government keeps making changes to how it tracks COVID data. Hello, and thank you all for joining us today for this briefing to update you on CDC's COVID-19 response. Dr. Nancy Messignet, the Director of CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, is running the press conference. The mood is serious. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us. She had been in the news over the last week for speaking up at a previous presser about her fears about COVID. In that media call, she surprised her colleagues at the CDC and Trump by saying she thought COVID would change daily life. Trump was furious. The stock market dipped immediately after. So at this press conference, Rob wonders what she might say. I just want to mention that we are no longer reporting the number of P.U.I.'s or patients under investigation, nor those who have tested negative. With more and more testing done at states, these numbers would not be representative of the testing being done nationally. States are reporting results quickly, and in the event of a discrepancy between CDC and state case counts, the state case counts should always be considered more up to date. Like, we don't think we have the up to date numbers anymore. Usually, go to the states for these numbers, and it was framed as very much like, uh. The states are in charge, like, we've given the test to the states. Rob feels like this is the key detail. The CDC appears to be taking no responsibility for telling the public what's happening with COVID testing. The states have the data. Not the CDC. Alexis is at home in Oakland, California. He's with his family in the kitchen, making dinner for his kids. He's just finished the work day. So, it's March 4th. My phone rings, it's Rob. And he basically says, like, dude, like, imagine that we are reporters on the Army Corps of Engineer Beat, and it's like three days before Katrina. Like, what the f*** are we doing? This is insane. Why are we not doing more? Because you're both so frustrated and angry and scared at that point. I said to Alexis, like, we're really staring down something catastrophic. And so, what can you do in that situation? What possible information do you try to get? Rob and Alexis know it's coming. Infection rates are about to surge, and people will die. So, I finished making dinner for the kids, and I go outside, and I'm like, it's tough. Like, I've got the kids already. I'm already know that I'm going to pull them from school, and I'm just thinking, like, oh man, like. I'm just trying to figure out the logistics of life right now. I was like, all right, Rob, what do you want to do? My proposal to him when I called him was like, we need to start asking state public health agencies how many have been tested and printing their refueled a comment if they don't tell us. He's like, this is the most important number for the country, for the world, maybe. We know there's only at the time there are only handful of cases that have been confirmed to the United States. But what does that number mean? Does it mean there's only a handful of cases? Or does it mean we haven't tested anybody, so we haven't been able to confirm that people have COVID? If we try to get numbers from states like the CDC has told us to do, they will obviously be incomplete. And then this will force the transition to release them. Let's split up the states, and then just email 25 each. And so we start doing it that night. We can write a form email. It will be very fast. We broke up the states, made a spreadsheet. We'll have a little Google Doc where we keep track of this. Let's see, so let me check here real quick. Most of them will refuse to respond, and that's fine. To do form email. The email that we wound up sending to states was "I'm Alexis Madrigal. I'm Rob Zimair, a staff writer at the Atlantic." We've been tracking the coronavirus outbreak very closely and have some questions about testing. We have three factual questions that we're asking state public health officials across the nation. One, how many people have been tested in your state total? Two, how many people have tested positive? Three, how many people can your state test per day? Thank you. My deadline is Thursday at 10 a.m. Thursday at 10 a.m. Thank you so much. Last edit was made on March 4, 2020 by Robinson Meyer. I think the morning of a March 5th, I was even like, "Well, that was a lark." I sent out all those emails last night. I'm not going to get any back. But Alexis started getting responses almost immediately. Good morning, Alexis. Good morning, Rob, and answered your questions. At this time, there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in South Carolina. How many people have been tested in Iowa total? Eight. We currently have the capacity to perform 80 to 100 tests per day. Florida, positive cases of COVID-19. There were nine. Pennsylvania. At this time, the state lab can test 20 to 25 specimens per day. Arkansas. How many people can your state test per day? Four to five people. Utah. Michigan. 86 people. Massachusetts. And we started to get enough responses back. We can start to say that America's testing capacity is really low. We put it together that the number was tiny. We basically moved in the course of an hour from, "Well, maybe there's probably nothing there." "Oh my gosh, we're sitting on national news. I need to publish immediately." So then around 6.15 p.m., we showed up in our editors' slacks. Like, hi guys, you didn't know this. But for the past 24 hours, we've emailed every state in the country. Now we're sitting on national news and we need you to help us publish the story immediately. So which editors were like, "What?" And of course, we were like, "Ahh, we need to publish!" And on March 6th, we published a story which is like, we can only confirm that fewer than 2,000 people have been tested for COVID in the United States. Okay, so today, these two great reports of the Atlantic did a lot of, like, shoe leather reporting, but they reported the following. We can only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States. The Atlantic magazine is reporting the quotes. And investigation about the Atlantic is published by the Atlantic on Friday. The Atlantic could only bear bias. Then 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus. And it was basically, as we were publishing the story, all hell started to break loose in America and people started to realize what was really happening. Which was that there were tons of infected people. You started to get these stories of, like, people getting sick with COVID-like symptoms. Just whole groups of people started to get really, really sick, particularly in New York. The virus starts taking hold in big cities and nursing homes. But public health officials still don't know how many people have it or where it's headed next. We need to have testing and we need to have testing available everywhere. After the break, Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus task force coordinator, takes the fight for testing data to Washington. So I wore my most military looking outfit I could find in my highest heels and went to work. You're listening to reveal. This series was funded in part by Tableau from Salesforce. As the world's leading analytics platform, Tableau helps you connect the dots between data, insights, and better business outcomes to make decisions at the speed of change. Salesforce, the global CRM leader, empowers companies of every size and industry to digitally transform and create a 360 degree view of their customers. Learn more at salesforce.com. From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is reveal. I'm Alexan and I remember when the first cases of COVID started appearing in the US, I was scared. From my loved ones, for me, for the world, and I had so many questions like, how do we protect ourselves? Does masking help? Where are the outbreaks? How many people are sick? How many have died? In the pandemic, the federal government found itself unable to answer many of those basic questions. Public health scientists like Jessica Malade Rivera were watching this unfold knowing that accurate information, especially testing data, was crucial. Here's Jessica. Before COVID, the US was ranked the world's best prepared nation to confront a pandemic. During previous outbreaks like Ebola or Zika, you'd go to the CDC website for the most up-to-date information. But this time, it was different. It begged the question, why were journalists the first to compile accurate nationwide COVID testing data? And why were they doing with the CDC or the White House Coronavirus Task Force should be doing? That's what COVID tracking project producers, artists, turrisks, and Kara Olor wanted to know. Okay, this is where I'm supposed to go. Up the hill? Up the hill into the right. So on a hot day in June 2022, they drive to the home of Dr. Debra Birx in Washington, D.C. And this is your house in the corner? Is that it? Yes. Oh, so many flowers. Dr. Birx was the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the Trump administration. She was on the news most days early in the pandemic. She was even spoofed on Saturday Night Live. Hello, I'm Dr. Debra Birx, Coronavirus Response Coordinator. There's one sketch where a cast member playing Dr. Birx talks about her decades of experience in infectious diseases and HIV research, and how the media mainly focuses on her vast collection of scarves. I'm on the front lines of this pandemic, synthesizing critical, dense information so that the public can digest it. And your takeaway is, wow, that lady sure has a lot of scarves. Or you might remember Dr. Birx from an infamous press conference. The one in April 2020 where President Trump suggests that disinfectant might be a cure for COVID. And I think you said you're going to take it too. Right, and then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number of lungs. So it'd be interesting to check that so that you're going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds interesting to me. Dr. Birx is sitting to the right of the President, hands clenched together in front of her with a stoic look. The camera is zoomed in on her face. As he continues to speak, she stares straight ahead looking very uncomfortable. She takes some deep breaths. A person that has a good, you know what? And when he turns to her and asks if she's heard of heat and light as a treatment, she says not as a treatment. But no one remembers that part. Dr. Birx's home is in a quiet neighborhood in DC. The front garden is lush with violent hydrangeas. Hi. Hi, Karen. Hi. Hi, Karen. We're good to meet both. Thank you. Your garden is beautiful. Oh, wow. Dr. Birx brings Karen and artists inside and walks them to a wood-paneled room with bookshelves full of presidential memoirs and scientific literature about infectious diseases. She tells them she has every COVID book that's been published. And in case you're wondering, she's not wearing one of her signature scarves. Should we stay this far apart? Is it okay to be closer with the mic? This is pandemic journalism. Everyone stays six feet apart. Dr. Birx is wearing a pink KN95 mask. No one in this household has gotten COVID, so we take all of our precautions. Thank you so much for having us here today. Yeah, yeah, no, I tested this morning too, so I like a tester. In January 2020, Dr. Birx is in Johannesburg, South Africa. She's running PEPFAR, a program coordinating the response to HIV AIDS in Africa. She was nominated for the job by President Obama. When news about COVID starts to spread, Dr. Birx is doing what she can to help leaders prepare. So she invites two former colleagues to speak with African ambassadors. Those colleagues are now well known to most Americans. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who she calls Tony, and Dr. Robert Redfield, then director of the CDC. She calls him Bob. I had Tony and Bob come because I thought, I mean, I was sure that we were doing what we were doing was right domestically. And I wanted them to talk about it. Tony talked about where we were with working on therapeutics and working on vaccines. And Bob talked about tests, so I'm thinking everything is covered. I'm thinking they've got this. But then she wonders, do they have this? The US response is less thorough than she expects. She's seeing news about temperature screenings and airports. You know the ones that they point at your forehead? And I'm like, oh, that's going to do nothing, nothing. I mean, that's not going to work. They should be testing at airports. Dr. Birx worries that without testing, public health officials will miss the asymptomatic cases. Meaning, people who have COVID, but don't have obvious symptoms, like a fever. And then she sees news out of Japan about a COVID outbreak on a cruise ship. Well, then update now on the coronavirus outbreak. And then I see the diamond princess. 10 people on the diamond princess cruise ship have tested positive for coronavirus. The 3700 passengers and crew are now under mandatory quarantine for two weeks. Then they isolated all of the passengers, but obviously not the crew. Yet the virus, you could see it spreading. Protective isolation was extended only to diamond princess passengers. Its crew continued going door to door. And I'm like, oh my god, they're not testing the crew and the crew being younger are the asymptomatic spreaders. This is right at the beginning of February 2020. Case numbers continue to rise on the ship, even though passengers are isolated. And so I'm thinking that this is the evidence base for asymptomatic spread, really clearly documented. I'm writing Bob about getting people off the ship. And I'm like, oh my god, everybody's going to get infected. Dr. Birx is sure that the crew is spreading the virus, but the only way to really know is by testing. And in those early days, we didn't diagnose anybody, really, that was asymptomatic, because there weren't enough tests. She figures the CDC is planning to launch a massive U.S. wide testing program. But then, right before Valentine's Day, some bad news hits about tests. And now to another story we continue to follow tonight, the deadly coronavirus. The slide setback when it comes to bracing for the deadly coronavirus here in the U.S. The CDC is remaking part of its coronavirus test kits. The CDC is redoing part, remaking part reformulating portions of test kits that were flawed. When the testing issue developed in the CDC, everybody was focused on the contamination. The CDC says that some of the test kits sent out to labs in states were defective. The agency says many of the kits have produced inconclusive results. But I wasn't focused on that. I was focused on the fact that they were only shipping these tests to public health labs. And my siren went off. State labs will have to wait until replacement components are shipped out by the CDC. And that's when I was like, oh my god, they're using the flu model. And then I kept hearing all these references to flu on the national news. And I'm like, oh, this is really, we're in so much trouble right now. Flu tests are run by public health labs around the country. Most states have one of these labs, just one. And Dr. Brooks is mine using the flu model for COVID-19 means testing a small percentage of people and using estimates to represent the spread of the virus throughout entire states and even the country. Also, flu tests are for people who are sick. Dr. Brooks thinks we should be giving COVID tests to people without symptoms too. She knows that we need real case data, not estimates. We don't know precisely how and when and where this virus is going to spread first and you're isolating our eyes. We don't have eyes on this virus. You've created holes in our surveillance system. She thinks the CDC should work with private labs to create millions of tests. Using only public health labs makes it impossible to fully know who has the virus. The state labs only cover a small fraction. Diagnostic kits are going out to about 100 regional centers now. They're getting help from public health lab that are part of a flu monitoring system nationwide to serve as an early warning if the coronavirus does show up. Public health labs across the country will soon begin testing people. Public health labs across the U.S. Public health labs across the country that meet CDC standards. I would be screaming at the South Africa. I was like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, you can't test just through the public health laboratories because they don't have high throughput platforms." I mean, they're made for really small-scale outbreaks. What we really needed was for testing to be available everywhere. Dr. Brooks, who was still in Johannesburg, writes to Matt Pondinger. He's Trump's Deputy National Security Advisor. Matt is concerned, too. They begin texting back and forth. She says things like, "Hey, I'm not seeing movement on testing." What is going on? Where are you getting the data? You know, I'm talking to Matt about the testing issue and getting people off the diamond princess. And he keeps calling me and saying, "They're not listening to me. I'm not an MD. I'm not a public health expert." Saying, "You just have to come. You just have to come." And I was like, "I don't want to come." She thinks that if she joins the Trump administration, it might end her career. She might never work in public health again. I mean, I knew what it meant to go into that particular White House, but I also knew how bad this was going to get. But Matt keeps asking. Matt's wife, Ying, is also a close friend. They had worked together back when Dr. Brooks was at the CDC. She gets in touch, too. She wrote me and said, "As a mom, you know the threat to our families and the country is our family and our patient at this time and you've got to come back." Matt doubles down and calls Dr. Brooks again. I tell Matt, "Fine, add my name to the list." For what? I don't even know what it is. It's volunteering to come back and help them with the COVID response at the federal level. I had no idea what it was. No idea. I mean, there was nothing beyond show up Monday morning. While Karen and artists are interviewing Dr. Brooks, she has to pause to take a Zoom call. Thank you. Thank you. So they have a chance to catch up with her husband, Paige Reef, in the kitchen. Paige worked for President Clinton. He and Dr. Brooks got married right before the first COVID case emerged. They were newlyweds while this was happening. Paige remembers the moment she decided to join the COVID response. She called him. She was in South Africa. She wasn't here. And she called to say, "Listen, I got a call." And she said, "He said basically the one thing that he knew would make me say yes." He said, "I was a Marine. You were in the Army. Your country needs you." And that's when she said, "Matt, we both understand that this is a terminal of end in my career." Her country needs you. And then she flew home and basically went into full mode. She got out of playing from South Africa. She got home on Sunday morning. She was at the White House on Monday morning. And then her lives changed forever. A good afternoon. We just finished the Monday meeting of the White House coronavirus task force. Then I go back and look at all our pandemic preparedness plans. So I'm reading the whole 24 hours coming back on the plane. And the plan doesn't really have space or dramatic expansion of tests or data. Deborah Berks will be on our team and even on her first day. She's already been contributing significantly. I knew when I flew back that day. I had to say to myself, it doesn't matter what they say about you. Dr. Berks serves as the U.S. government's leader today for combating HIV/AIDS globally. Everybody else on the task force except for Tony is a political. I mean, I knew I was going to be in a very deep hole. Thank you, Mr. Vice President. It's a pleasure to be here. I just arrived from South Africa last night. So I wore my most military looking outfit. I could find in my highest heels and went to work. I'm trying to get up to speed as fast as possible. And I look forward to the days I've had really working together to end this epidemic. Thank you. I assumed that there was data. I mean, I thought, okay, well, when I get there, I'll meet with Bob and I'll see all the data. I just believe that there had to be real U.S. data. And I go to the first task force meeting Monday morning and out comes a double-sided Excel sheet with cases on it. That's what the CDC produced. And I was like, what? So I meet with Bob afterwards and said, well, okay, that's what you presented at task force. Where's the rest of the data? Where is the data down to the county level, the community level? They didn't have that data. What did you say back to him? Well, I looked at him and just said, Bob, we have data on every single person who is tested. They're test results and they're referrals in some Saharan Africa. Are you telling me we don't have this here? Dr. Brooks and her team have a system for knowing every single person who has been tested for HIV on the entire continent of Africa. And she's shocked that the CDC isn't doing something similar for COVID. And so that whole week, I'm really worried because now I realize we not only have to create tests in a communication plan and an action plan, a full response plan, but now I have to create data streams. Where is the COVID data? That same question was nagging at Alexis and Rob, the Atlantic reporters who we heard from earlier. Coming up, they take it upon themselves to track testing and infections across the entire country, pulling together COVID data with help from an army of volunteers. If we hadn't thought the world was ending, it would have been a really cool thing to watch. That's next on Reveal. From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letton. Today, we're taking you back to the beginning of the pandemic when information was scarce. Public health data about infection rates, hospitalizations, and deaths was critical to controlling the spread of COVID-19. But the CDC wasn't releasing it. We're trying to figure out why. Epidemiologist Jessica Melotti Rivera of the COVID tracking project brings us back to the moment when reporters from the Atlantic broke the first big story about the lack of testing data in the US. Rob Meyer and Alexis Magical, the journalist you heard from earlier in the show, published their article about the lack of testing in the US on March 6, 2020. Right after the story goes live, Alexis gets a message. We hit publish on the story. I don't know, 10, 20 minutes later, I checked my email and I have an email from a guy named Jeff Hammerbacher. So, Jeff Hammerbacher was like an old friend of mine. He was kind of like one of these funny guys who was like a super jacked baseball player. But Loki was like actually like a massive aunt. Super brainy dude, but anyway, he sent me this email that was basically like, hey man, so glad you post this. Did you use my spreadsheet to help report this out? So I clicked on the link and realized that Jeff Hammerbacher, my friend since I was 18 years old, had been doing the exact same thing that Rob and I had just done. Jeff has also been looking at every state website and writing down the numbers in a spreadsheet, tracking the spread of the virus. Jeff is a figure things out numbers person. He's one of the people credited with founding the field of data science. He was an early hire at Facebook and designed its data systems. When COVID hits, he's worried about his family and their safety. They're planning a trip to China in April. So he goes to the CDC website and one day there's COVID testing data for the entire US. And the next, it's gone. And someone was asking on Twitter like, where did the statistic go? That's Jeff. After COVID data vanishes from the CDC website, he sees a Twitter threat about it. There's a reply from someone at the Association of Public Health Labs. And it says, if you want case data, you have to go to the states. Well this is how it's supposed to work. There wasn't supposed to be a federal dashboard. It's a state level problem, so states are going to report the data. And I just thought to myself, this is bonkers. Like, why would that be how we do this? So I just went looking for public health websites for every state. Jeff takes it upon himself to publicly share whatever he finds. So I just started tweeting every day at 5 p.m. like the data. He publishes the sheet on March 4th. Thousands of people start viewing it. Two days later, Alexis and Rob published their story, showing how few people have been tested. Less than 2,000 in the entire country. And I read it and I was like, wow, this is, are they using my data? Like this looks exactly like what I've been, what I've been working on, that's funny. And I thought, well maybe Alexis just saw, you know? Like, so I just, I sent him an email just to say like, hey man, did you all use this data for your project? So I sent him and back a message like seven minutes later saying, holy shit, I wish we had. We're his exact words. We made this one, which is a hell of a lot messier and includes media reports and conversations with health officials. Tell me more about your spreadsheet. We got to talking and I was kind of like, you know, you want to figure out a way to keep working on this together. Alexis talks to Rob and they all decide to team up together. They assume it's temporary, but they're only going to do it until the CDC starts publishing the data itself. Maybe a few days. Until then, they plan to gather the testing data from states every day and publish it in their spreadsheet. And it's a lot of data collection. So they create a sign-up form to recruit volunteers. The form was called state testing tracking. And they tweeted out. Thanks for your interest in this project. We've merged two state testing tracking efforts together, Jeffrey Hammer-Bockers and the Atlantic. Volunteers start to hear about it. I was just like on Twitter one day and I saw a call out for volunteers. I saw a tweet. Jeff and Rob retweet it. I think Nate Silver actually retweeted something. A political blog picks it up. Talking about how like the only place you could get any decent data was this one spreadsheet. And if you wanted to volunteer, you could. More people retweet it. Apparently I was the officially the first person in the volunteer spreadsheet. And this thing is like starting to form like I'm just like picking the name out of a hat. Yeah, you know, COVID tracking project. Sure. We'll call it that just completely ad hoc. Suddenly, there are a lot of people wanting to help. And a lot of people wanting the data. The Google sheet is seeing an enormous amount of traffic. I came across the COVID tracking project actually on Twitter. That's Ryan Pinchansaram. He was the deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration. And I thought this was interesting and odd, right? I was like, well, huh. So let me just go to CDC.gov and see what's there. And you go to CDC.gov and there's nothing there. Ryan got in touch to see if he could volunteer. And I think within that like 12 to 24 hour period of asking, how can I help? The spreadsheet was getting so much traffic that they couldn't edit it. You know, Google kept throwing its error messages. That first weekend, we basically broke Google sheets. We had saturated the number of people who were viewing the spreadsheet. So I was like just frantically trying to track down people that knew Google sheets better than I did. And so the way that I first helped was sending a note to Google. Oh, yeah, let me see if I can pull that one out. All right. Yeah, here we go. It was March 8th, urgent Google sheet issue tracking COVID testing data. It was an email thread started by Ryan Pinchansaram. I hope things are well. Jeff, him and Walker and Alexis Madrigal have been waiting. He hasn't led it for a track state-level testing data for COVID. For a lot of folks hitting the spreadsheet, so it's unavailable. Which isn't great because this is one of the only sources of COVID testing data in the United States. It's crazy to think about how fast this is all happening. The CDC is unfortunately not taking responsibility for aggregating and sharing these numbers. We hope they do soon. And I say, is there anyone within Google that can assist? And it ultimately got escalated up. The chain at Google is at the point where I got an email from Sudar Pishai, the CEO. The fucking CEO of Google was like put some guys on it. I got some people that I'm going to send you away. We're going to help. Within a few hours of Sundar's email, Google engineers start to work on the problem. They bring this spreadsheet back online by the end of the weekend. And that was my first day as a volunteer on the COVID tracking project. Alexis and Jeff start organizing volunteers to do data shifts while Rob is focused on reporting about the data. He spends most of his time calling public health departments and doctors. And every time Rob pops back into the COVID tracking project slack, it's grown that crazy. And so then I'd go in the slack. And every time it was like there's this scene in one of the Star Trek movies. We're basically like a plant like evolves all the geological and biological complexity of life in two minutes on screen. There's like a device called the Genesis device. Access to Project Genesis Summary. And it was like every time that I came into the CDP Slack for the next week, it was like a higher order of life had evolved in the slack. Genesis is life from lifelessness. You come in, you know, the first time it was like 20 people and we were just like slacking about COVID data. Then I'd log in like six hours later, 50 people in the slack. And there were seven different rooms and like, you know, vertebrates had evolved. Like there were bony fishes, you know, and then I'd log in the next day and there'd be a hundred people in the slack. Hundreds of volunteers. All these people who felt the same way that I did really trying to help. And it was like there's flowering plants. So many people gather together with the fishes have crawled up on the land, you know? All of these volunteers start showing up and suddenly there are hundreds of them from all over the country. So many different people from scientists and public health professionals to high school kids, from academic researchers to boutique cannabis cultivators. Some of last family members to the virus and others just want to help out any way they can. I was absolutely blown away. I'm a scientist and glad to help in any way I can. I'm here. I work in healthcare. And snowboard a lot of high school seniors. I'm a tech person. Teaching ballroom dance is what I do. My kids are triplets. It's crazy, crazy life. Every day the whole slack was like building out. It was overwhelming. And it was jargon and lingo. I had never used slack before. I'm like, what is a thread and then channel assembling new appendages like in a, you know, an alien life form. I just wanted to do something useful and wanted to help in some way. If we hadn't thought the world was ending, you know, it was like it would have been a really cool thing to watch. Not long after it started, I joined the COVID tracking project. I messaged Alexis. He added me to the slack and I started volunteering. I wanted to help. With my background in tracking outbreaks, I felt I had something to contribute. And I immediately realized we were all asking the same questions. Where is the CDC? Is the Trump administration silencing them? And where is the data? Honestly, I figured it would be a short gig. Maybe a couple of months of volunteering while the CDC got it together and sorted their systems out. We had no idea it would take more than a year. Next episode will hear from the volunteers who became the de facto source of COVID data for the country. When we actually looked inside the federal government response around data, you were just sort of like, aren't there any people in here? Like, we're building data services out of like sunflower seeds and big league chew. Like, where are the people? COVID tracking project volunteers kept track of every reported infection and death. The pressure there under keeps ratcheting up. You begin to realize that you really are tracking deaths and people on ventilators and things like that. I actually always joke up when I talk about this when I start to realize it. This is not just a data project, this is a project about human data. And some of it can be a little difficult. Watching the numbers go up and up is a little difficult, for sure. With emergency rooms overflowing and death tolls starting to spike, getting a hold of good data would become more important than ever. A refrigerated truck has now been brought in here, a makeshift morgue. Refrigerated trucks and tents have been stationed outside of some hospitals to hold the bodies of the dead. I need every city, I need every county, I need every state. And I need cases and test positivity and hospitalizations. And I was like, wow, aren't you getting that from the CDC? And she's like, well, I haven't been able to get it yet, but maybe you can figure it out. There are always no US data that I could rely on. The US was the top rated country in the world for pandemic preparedness. So why was the government relying on a bunch of volunteers? I think the term is moral injury. It's really hard to deal with sort of systemic betrayal by the organizations whose job it is to keep everyone safe. That's coming up next week on part two of our series, The COVID Tracking Project. Our lead producers for this week's show are artists, turiscus, and Kara Oler. Michael Aishiller edited the show. Jessica Malati Rivera is the series host. Thanks to production, assistance, Max Maldenado, Corey Suzuki, and Arushi Sahedge Paul. Thanks also to the COVID Tracking Project at the Atlantic where it all began. And the oral history team there, this series was funded in part by Tableau from Salesforce. Thank you, Frick is our fact checker. Victoria Baranetski is our general counsel. Our production manager is Steven Raskone. Score and sound designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, a Fernando, my man, Yo Aruda. Our post-production team is the Justice League, and this week it includes Catherine Steyer Martinez. Our digital producer is Sarah Merck. Our CEO is Robert Rosenthal. Our COO is Maria Feldman. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telenitas. Artists and Kara co-execute produced and reported the series. Our theme music is by Kamarato Lightning. Support for reveals provided by the Riva and David Logan Foundation. The Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX. I'm Al Ledson. And remember, there is always more to the story. PRX.