Covid Tracking Project Will End

Last night as I was updating my coronavirus data, I learned that March 7 was to be the last day for the Covid Tracking Project.

Man, that was a shocker.

Although, as I thought about it, it is not surprising. The Covid Tracking Project was a volunteer project hosted by The Atlantic news media. According to the article found on the site, March 7th represent one year since the inception of this project and one year seemed like a good end point for the project.

As the article said, this project was an all volunteer project where the participants freely donated their time and effort. Some worked after regular working hours, some quit their jobs (!!!), some didn’t see their family much. The main reason for starting the project was due to the lack of trust in the Trump government to track and disburse the data in a transparent manner, and so a few people got together to improve the data gathering and reporting process that was missing from the Trump government.

Now that the Biden administration has taken over, the group sees signs of better data gathering and reporting, and so decided that it was time to let the government do what it should have been doing all along last year.

My Power BI actually uses a lot of the data from the Covid Tracking Project, specifically the deaths, the hospitalization and the testing/positivity rates, so I have to find a replacement for those data. The deaths I can pull from the John Hopkins University but there will be a day time lag: instead of retrieving the data from the night of, I get the data the following day. The others, I don’t know where I’m going to find the data – the raw data, not the massaged charts and graphics for regular consumer consumption.

Right now, we’re not totally over the pandemic: we have a couple of states reopening their economy and even eliminating the mask mandates; thus, I want to continue gathering the data and seeing the direction the pandemic takes because the trends could go back up. I want to track Texas, but I got to figure out another source – especially hospitalization. Hospitalization was a good data point. The Covid Tracking Project said that the government was now handling the data gathering and reporting much better, so I will have to check out the government site. Is it the CDC or Healthgov?

The other question I have is will the data be raw data for those who want to pull in the data and wrestle with it themselves, rather than have someone parse the story for them? I’m trying to learn how to make sense of the data and learn how to use the tools I have so raw data is the best medium for me. I prefer to struggle through it myself.

I get it…a year is a long time to devote whatever little hours you got to doing this volunteer work so it is time for them to rejoin life and go back to their families. But I sure am going to miss the Covid Tracking Project – they were very reliable and I had no issues with them.