The COVID Tracking Project Part 1
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2023
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The United States has 4% of the world’s population but 16% of COVID-19 deaths. This series investigates the failures by federal agencies that led to over 1 million Americans dying from COVID-19 and what that tells us about the nation’s ability to fight the next pandemic. Epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera is the host for this three-part series.
The first episode takes us back to February 2020, when reporters Rob Meyer and Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic were trying to find solid data about the rising pandemic. They published a story that revealed a scary truth: The U.S. didn’t know where COVID-19 was spreading because few tests were available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also didn’t have public data to tell citizens or federal agencies how many people were infected or where the outbreaks were happening.
Their reporting led to a massive volunteer effort by hundreds of people across the country who gathered the data themselves. The COVID Tracking Project became a de facto source of data amid the chaos of COVID-19. With case counts rising quickly, volunteers scrambled to document tests, hospitalizations and deaths in an effort to show where the virus was and who was dying.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. |
| 0:09.8 | It's 2008 and Jessica Melotti Rivera's friends all think she's a spy or some kind of |
| 0:16.1 | secret agent. |
| 0:17.5 | I was not a spy. I kept trying to say like guys I'm just a nerd that works at university |
| 0:22.6 | on a really really dorky but important project. |
| 0:25.9 | She's living in DC. She leaves early every morning and comes home late at night. She speaks |
| 0:32.4 | multiple languages, Arabic, Spanish, English and some Portuguese and she can't talk about |
| 0:38.0 | what she does during the day. |
| 0:40.3 | Jessica's working on something called project Argus. |
| 0:44.0 | Project Argus was named after Argus, the 100-eyed giant in Greek mythology, the one who |
| 0:48.8 | can see all things. |
| 0:51.2 | Project Argus is at Georgetown University and its main clients are the intelligence community |
| 0:56.8 | and the Department of Defense. |
| 0:58.7 | Our job at Project Argus was to track and identify these early warnings of emerging infectious |
| 1:04.9 | disease outbreaks and my colleagues and I covered about 50 different languages and every |
| 1:10.1 | morning we would read new sources from all over the world looking for keywords like overwhelmed |
| 1:15.6 | hospitals or mass hysteria. |
| 1:19.2 | They're trying to stop the next epidemic from happening. |
| 1:22.8 | In 2009 they began noticing strange activity on a pig farm in Mexico and reports of an |
| 1:29.6 | influenza-like illness among the farmers there. |
| 1:32.7 | And it escalated quite quickly. There were a number of animals, you know, sick pigs on |
| 1:38.0 | a farm and farmers that were sick too and by piecing these kinds of clues together we alerted |
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