So Robinson, when people ask you, like, how many people have had the coronavirus in the United States, I'm kind of curious. You're really deep in the numbers. Do you just kind of laugh?

Yeah, there's not, I don't think we have anywhere close to an answer for that right now.

Robbins & Meyer is a reporter for the Atlantic.

Even with perfect data, we would probably never fully know.

It's so funny because it's the most important question to some degree.

Like, it's the one question we'd really, really love to know about how bad this

outbreak is, and it's the one we can't answer. Usually, Robinson covers the energy and climate

beat. But in the last couple of months, he's reinvented himself as an expert on testing for the

coronavirus. He's helping run the Atlantic's COVID tracking project.

It's made him hyper aware that asking, who's had the coronavirus?

It may sound simple, but answering that question is anything but.

The question we've always been trying to answer to some degree with the COVID tracking

project from the beginning was not even how many people have gotten sick, but just trying to understand the

scale of how many people have gotten sick. And that meant asking how many people have been tested

for COVID. And the CDC was releasing testing numbers basically through January and February.

And then on February 29th, it stopped publishing them.

It just said, hey, state labs are going to be doing a lot of this testing.

And that's it.

So Robinson and his colleagues assembled a team of volunteers to meticulously track what each state was reporting.

Every day, dozens of them, watch press conferences, download testing data from the local health departments.

They've been doing this for

months. Our first goal was we assumed the CDC had this data somewhere in the agency and that

...