For the past year, The COVID Tracking Project was a vital resource for those trying to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.
But the volunteer team ended its data collection on March 7, as the quality of data provided by the federal government improved.
"We’ve been collecting this data hoping all the way that we’d hand it back to federal authorities, which is kind of what we feel like is happening right now," said Alexis Madrigal, staff writer at The Atlantic and co-founder of The COVID Tracking Project.
Madrigal, a guest on KCBS Radio’s "Ask An Expert," said that the federal government can require states to report specific data, but at the beginning of the pandemic, it was not doing a good job of that.
However, federal data has been improving since summer, through the transition to the Biden administration, he said.
Madrigal added that his team is now focusing on pressuring the feds to get the best data possible to the public, presented in easily digestible ways, but ensured that the data currently being published is reliable.
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People who are worried about the authenticity of government numbers, shouldn’t be, he said.
"You have these county health officials who have devoted their entire lives to protecting people’s public health," Madrigal said. "There’s thousands of them. In order for the numbers not to be real, you’d need a conspiracy of thousands of public health officials who have all come together to cook the books."
He said he personally gets data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as HealthData.gov, which has hospitals’ data.
"Keep your eyes on the hospital data," Madrigal said. "We always say this. It’s way, way, way less variable and has way fewer problems with reporting artifacts and other things throughout the data."
He added that if the hospitals’ numbers start to go down, that’s how we’ll really know the pandemic is coming to an end.
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