One of the reasons I started this blog was to have a place to put down posts and articles that have lodged themselves in my brain. The wind-down announcement of the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-led COVID-19 data tracking collaboration, is one such article.
But the work itself—compiling, cleaning, standardizing, and making sense of COVID-19 data from 56 individual states and territories—is properly the work of federal public health agencies. Not only because these efforts are a governmental responsibility—which they are—but because federal teams have access to far more comprehensive data than we do, and can mandate compliance with at least some standards and requirements.
After one year of work, the COVID Tracking Project decided to quite collecting data on COVID-19 in the United States, because they recognized that the work of collecting a comparable, national-level dataset was the responsibility of federal government agencies.
As someone who co-led the COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group, which curated COVID-19 data for Canada until the end of 2023, I think about this article a lot. It’s a good read, and it speaks to how essential open data was to filling in the gaps in the national and international understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.