NPR.

This is the indicator for planet money, I'm Adrian Ma.

And I'm Daryl Woods.

Today we had a grave milestone for the US, a million recorded deaths from COVID-19.

That's one in 330 Americans recorded as dead from the disease.

It's a really hard number to wrap your head around.

And all through the pandemic, there have been a group of people who have basically been

stuck to their laptops trying to help us make sense of these numbers.

Data people.

Yeah, like the Johns Hopkins track, which as the numbers that NPR follows.

There were also models and forecasts coming out of places like the University of Washington.

But out of all these websites and charts, one of the first was built with a specific

question in mind.

After the terrifying images from Wuhan, will my country be next?

In the chart that I was refreshing every single day was made by the British newspaper at

the Financial Times.

This chart had the classic FT salmon colored background.

And it showed these colorful lines rising and rising.

It was how many COVID cases various countries had.

Today on the show, an interview with its author, one of the best COVID data journalists

in the business.

We sit down with John Bern Mardach from the Financial Times.

...