--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today. It's also the final day in our week-long series marking one year of pandemic life.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Over the past week, we've been talking with journalists who've done extraordinary work covering the personal toll of the pandemic, the disproportionate impact it's having on women and Black communities, and about our failures as a country.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today, our interview with Alexis Madrigal. He's the co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. It tracks testing, hospitalizations, patient outcomes, racial and ethnic demographics, and what's happening in long-term care facilities. A hugely labor-intensive project they started because... Well, the federal government was asleep at the switch in the early days.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I mean, you think back to March and April and February, and just everything was going wrong in the American response.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The first question the COVID Tracking Project wanted to answer last spring was, how many people are being tested? Alexis says this is a really crucial number to have a handle on. Because one thing that has been true throughout the pandemic is that if you don't test enough, you don't really know what's happening.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You don't know how many cases there are, which means you don't know how many people are sick, which means you don't know how many people end up in the hospital, which means you don't know how many people are going to die.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it's actually fascinating what a through line it has been that bad data and bad data interpretation has just been with us throughout this pandemic. Not only was the U.S. not testing enough, but as Alexis explains, the way testing data was being collected wasn't fast, efficient or uniform.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In large part because states have so much autonomy over their pandemic response. In this country, we don't have an overarching way to collect data. And this becomes a bigger problem when we're in an emergency and need that data fast.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The number one failure is that we have underfunded public health departments to be able to do the work of really this emergency response. And so when the virus started to hit these various places, even the basics of counting the number of cases became overwhelming for public health departments.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This is the grandest failure of the whole thing. Everybody in the federal and state governments and all public health infrastructure, all pandemic preparedness planning assumes a base layer of good data. And it turned out to be just this crucial, crucial problem.
--:-- Alexis Madrigal: Alexis you talk about having these expectations that the data gathering would be good and reliable And that just didn't happen. And I kind of feel like that's been a theme of the whole pandemic. You know we assumed that we as a country would be more prepared than we were.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Why that disconnect? It's the story of America, as far as I'm concerned, you know. I think that's just, it really is like this gap between the American mythos that we're the greatest country in the world and our state capacity.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Over the last 30, 40, 50 years of American politics, we've hollowed out a lot of government capacity. And so when we go to do stuff, we can't do it. Because actually, as it turns out, you need institutions that have been working on this stuff for a long time that have been funded. You need a government.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And if you are constantly trying to make the government small and not work, you know, then you end up with a government that doesn't work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So with our government capacity hollowed out, Alexis's team jumped in to fill in the gaps. And the information they gathered with the COVID tracking project ended up being used in a bunch of different ways.
--:-- Alexis Madrigal: We know that states, for example, were using the data to decide who could move freely into their state and who could not. We know that the federal government themselves, when they were trying to develop databases, particularly around testing and hospitalizations, needed to know what the states were reporting.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So they were getting data in the federal government, but they didn't know how complete it was. And so they would use the COVID tracking project to be like, okay, well, they have this many tests for this state and they have that. Okay, why do these charts look different?
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, it was used in a lot of different ways. I mean, we found that like, you know, people needed to know this stuff and it wasn't available in a standard accessible way.
--:-- Alexis Madrigal: Beyond collecting good, standardized data, the COVID Tracking Project has another mission to tell people what the data means without trying to prescribe what people should do with it. A lot of public health communication is oftentimes what I call tactical. They're basically trying to tell you something to get you to do something.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And we adopted a different kind of mantra, which was about being faithful to what we saw. Take last month, for example. After that cold snap hit parts of the southern U.S., the CDC was saying. Cases are on the rise. You know, everybody stay vigilant.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the truth is that what happened was this storm came through, suppressed case counts in a bunch of states like Texas and Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi. And then as that storm went away, those backlog kind of caught up. And so basically things got driven down too far artificially and now too high artificially.
--:-- Alexis Madrigal: But we can kind of see that and say listen cases probably aren't actually rising. What happened was this storm created this artifact in the data. And a lot of people are mad that we say stuff like that because it seems to contradict what the CDC is saying.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And our point is they're doing tactical communication where they're using a data artifact to encourage vigilance. But our position has been people are smart enough to understand what's going on here. And we can just say, here's what we think is happening.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This week, the COVID tracking project collected its last data points exactly one year into the pandemic. Alexis says his team made the decision to end the project a few weeks after Joe Biden won the election.
--:-- Alexis Madrigal: The main thing is, we always said, the best place for this data collection and publication interpretation is the federal government. Like, they have the statutory power to standardize what's coming back from the state.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And I have a considerable amount of faith now that they have like the people who can do it, people who want to do it. And now the Biden administration is in people who are allowed to do it. That if we put the right pressure on the federal government in the right places, they'll produce the data sets that are actually the highest quality and most standard across all the states.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You are a man of data. You're looking at this data right now. As a country, when do you think we're going to turn the corner? And what data points should we be focused on so that we know when politicians say, go out, take off your masks, that we can actually do this?
--:-- Alexis Madrigal: For me, it has always been what started this emergency is people getting hospitalized and people dying, like severe illness and death. And if we could drive down those rates sufficiently, then I think you could say, even if we're still seeing the virus moving through our communities, if people aren't going to the hospital and they're not dying of it, it's probably okay to live a normal life.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But as Alexis explains, it's not like COVID is going to go away entirely. We will be living with some number of people who die from this virus every day. So how many deaths would we be comfortable with and still feel like things are safe?
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's a really tough question. And I'll tell you why. A lot of people said, a lot of the experts I talked to said, well, it's like if we got down under the number of deaths that are caused by the flu, then like, you know, people are generally speaking fine with the risk posed by seasonal flu, which does in fact kill a lot of people.
--:-- Alexis Madrigal: And so a lot of people that I talked to said, okay, that would be a fair number to pick. And that would be, let's call it roughly 100 deaths a day. So here's the question. Are we actually going to get there? We may but people want to open up now right I think 100 deaths a day is extremely ambitious given how bad we've been at this pandemic generally speaking.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And if we got there, I'd be ecstatic, honestly.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Okay, last question for you, which is actually a question that we've been asking our listeners. So now our inbox is full of voicemails about this. We wanted to ask you this too. We're asking everyone, what's something that you'll never look at the same way again?
--:-- Alexis Madrigal: I mean, the truth is, for me, probably the CDC is the thing. I thought they were something that they're not, I think. That's really tough. And I hope that either the CDC gets rebuilt into that thing that I thought it was, the pandemic fighting force, or that some set of other governmental entities become that.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: My other answer, though, is plants. I've become so into plants. They just, all my little clippings of neighborhood plants. I've been going on these like night walks and every once in a while, I'll just get a little clipping of somebody's succulent and I've been like sprouting them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And honestly, that's like the thing that's like kept me sane, you know? Just like, you know, instead of like-
--:-- Alexis Madrigal: Hold on, you've been going around your neighborhood snipping people's plants in the dark of night? Just tiny, tiny little bit. Just a tiny, little, tiny, tiny little unnoticeable amount. That's your pandemic outlet, no judging.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Yes, exactly, exactly. If I'm missing a leaf, Alexis was here. There's a leaf missing from my plant.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, here's what some of you said when we asked what you'll never see the same way again after the pandemic. One thing that I am never going to look at the same are water fountains.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I think the thing that I'll never look at the same is masking.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think it'll take some time before I look at rush hour and public transportation the same way.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I don't think I'll ever quite view handshakes the same way after the pandemic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I don't ever think I'll use social media solely to depend on my friendships ever again.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The pandemic has changed the way I look at mental health in the workplace. The idea that we have to go somewhere to go to work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Once I get vaccinated, I'm going to be the most excited person that you're going to see going through the security line at TSA.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I'm a hugger and there's no more hugging. Thanks a lot, COVID.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thanks to all of you who shared your stories and to everyone for listening this week. As always, you can find the stories we spoke about in this series in the Apple News app. And while you're there, check out some of our audio stories. We'll be back on Monday in our regular format. Talk with you again then. Have a great weekend. Thank you.
