Bloomberg Businessweek - USA (2020-11-23)

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Bloomberg Businessweek November 23, 2020

Edited by

Amanda Kolson Hurley

○ Thegovernmentstruggled

to publish high-quality data on

the virus, so the unofficial Covid

Tracking Project stepped up

Covid -1

Someone she followed online put out a call

for volunteers to assist with a new project tally-

ing how many Covid tests were being run across

the U.S.—something the public wasn’t getting a

straight answer on from the federal government. “I

had nothing to do. I was at home alone, anyways,”

French says. “It was much healthier than reading

all the scary news.” So on March 18, she signed up.

Since then, the Covid Tracking Project—run

by a small army of data-gatherers, most of them

volunteers—has become perhaps the most trusted

source on how the pandemic is unfolding in the

U.S. The website has been referenced by epidemi-

ologists and other scientists, news organizations,

YO U

At the start of 2020, Amanda French was in

between academic jobs. Her mother had died

about a year earlier, and she’d taken time off to

help settle her affairs. Then the pandemic hit,

interrupting her employment search, and she was

alone outside Raleigh, N.C., with little to do but

doomscroll through Twitter, as she described it.