Via The Washington Post: Goodbye, Johns Hopkins covid tracker. Excerpt:
When the pandemic hit, the federal government struggled to publish snapshots of the virus’ spread.
So, academics and journalists quickly filled the void, creating new tools with near real-time estimates of the unfolding pandemic. Since January 2020, Johns Hopkins University has operated one of the most prominent resources for tracking covid-19 case counts and deaths across the world.
After more than three years, the university will stop updating its tracker on March 10 as the country has moved into a different stage of the pandemic with a different data flow. But the story of the online dashboard — a $13 million project that’s been viewed over 2.5 billion times — is more than just about a tool to track the pandemic. It underscores the country’s fragmented public health systems and its decentralized and underfunded reporting system, which hobbled the U.S. pandemic response.
“The thing that became the biggest surprise was the importance and reliance on it by everyone: by the general public and decision-makers and everyone in between,” said Lauren Gardner, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering who started the global tracker with one of her PhD students.
“Hopkins filled a gap that nobody else was able to do,” Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at University of Washington’s IHME. “So all of us, reporters, us in academia, we went to Hopkins to get the data.”
Why now?
The Johns Hopkins researchers point out that they don’t believe the pandemic has ended — and the move to stop updating the tracker shouldn’t be conflated as such. Instead, the decision comes amid a different phase of the pandemic and was made for two main reasons.
The first: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have built up their capacity to share covid data with the general public, which Gardner called the “appropriate” entities to be providing this information long term.
The second: The quality of the tracker depends on the quality of publicly available data. At the beginning of the pandemic, states, counties and even cities were providing daily covid updates, which scrapers for the tracker could collect data from. But that’s not the case anymore, and that has a direct impact on what the dashboard can do.
Looking forward
The country has made some improvements on its data collection efforts, but there’s still a ways to go, according to several experts.
Beth Blauer, an associate vice provost at Johns Hopkins University who helped run the Coronavirus Resource Center, said that many states closed up their covid reporting with little information on any next steps.
“Our big question is whether or not they’re making long-term investments in critical public health data infrastructure to navigate lots of challenges that they face,” Blauer said, citing the opioid epidemic and economic mobility.
