One of the images I think will stick with me long after this pandemic is over is the simple

visualization that got repeated over and over again, a line graph showing waves of coronavirus infections,

followed by what felt like a tsunami over the winter. You'd see these graphs

when you opened up the newspaper, and they'd get blasted out over Twitter. And the data many

of these charts were based on, it came from one source, the COVID tracking project.

I wonder if you'll ever look at a line graph the same way again, because I feel like

I close my eyes and I see the sort of waves of coronavirus, and that must go double for you.

Yeah, it is interesting. Like, any certain shapes of charts, like I definitely am like, oh, I know that one.

Alexis Madrigal runs the COVID tracking project

with his colleagues over the Atlantic magazine.

He's a journalist there.

And last year he was looking for information

no one seemed to have,

which is how he ended up recruiting a bunch of volunteers to track it down, state by state.

He was looking for COVID testing and infection numbers, hospitalization rates, death data.

And what they found was a bit of a mess.

Each state was doing it their own way, feeding dribbles or deluges of information to an unsuspecting public.

It's funny. I do think that it has changed my relationship to the idea of data a little bit.

It has not led me to believe that data is like all-knowing or powerful or, you know, something other than,

you know, it's just something categorically different.

It's just as flawed as everything else.

Yeah.

...