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Slack.com slash DHQ. 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 day looses 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 something

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