So Robinson, when people ask you 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.

Robinson Meyer is a reporter for the Atlantic.

And 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.

He'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.

...