To the COVID Tracking Project which will no longer be tweeting the number every day, much to my regret. It has been the single most useful bit of information on the spread of the pandemic out there and I’ll miss it, particularly since we may be looking at yet another surge coming our way, even as people re getting vaccinated in large numbers. It was sponsored by the Atlantic to provide information we weren’t getting from the government at the time. They’ve decided to stop now that the government is doing its job.
The following is their last daily tweet thread and I thought it was interesting.
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.2 million tests, 41k cases, 40,212 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and 839 deaths. This is our final day of data collection after a very long year.
The project was initially created to track testing. The first few days, states reported just a few thousand total tests. Today, states reported 1.2 million tests. The single-day high for the year was December 5 at 2.3 million. Cumulatively, we’ve tracked 363 million tests.
We ended up tracking other metrics. Cases reached heights we never could have imagined in the early days. The 7-day average got to 250 thousand cases per day in early January. Today, states reported the fewest number of cases since October 6, before the winter surge.
Hospitalizations have also fallen from highs over 130 thousand down to just over 40 thousand today.
Deaths have tracked the other metrics, at a delay, as they have through the pandemic. This is the first day we’ve seen fewer than 1000 deaths reported since November 29, more than 3 months ago.
It’s impossible to take in the sweep of the pandemic. But on this day last year, fewer than 20 people were known to have died from COVID-19 in the US. There were only 574 cases. Now, 10 states have seen more than 1 in 500 of their residents killed during the pandemic.
Our data collection ends today, but the CTP will continue publishing accountability work. We want to use our knowledge of the nation’s data to show how we might fix the structural problems we’ve identified.
We have many thank yous. First, to the frontline healthcare workers, who risked their lives to treat this emerging disease.
Second, thank you to the health department officials who gathered up the data that we compile. We know that we are merely the last step that this data takes. What you all have done, despite funding cuts and impossible hours, is the definition of public service.
And we want to thank our advisory board members, too, who brought necessary domain expertise and helped us through some very hard decisions. @areshasays, @EricTopol, @gillianbwhite, @yayitsrob, @rypan, @trvrb, @dr_tonyiton, @nataliexdean, and @hackingdata.
https://covidtracking.com/about/advisory-board/
We couldn’t have done this work for an entire year without being able to give stipends to some of the people who worked on it full-time. Thanks to our funders—and the folks who donated the software that we ran on. https://covidtracking.com/about
https://covidtracking.com/about/software
Our project’s key value is a culture of gratitude, saying thank you even for things that are a normal part of the job. In this year where so much has come at all of us, it has helped to remember that at the very least, we have each other to be thankful for.
In the beginning of the pandemic, @edyong209 told us that natural disasters bring people together, but pandemics tear people apart. We like to think that CTP was an active protest against those divisions.
And—this is @alexismadrigal and @kissane—we have to thank CTP’s contributors. This project came out of nothing. You became its blood and bones. We know how much you sacrificed—jobs, school, kidtime—and how much it sometimes hurt to handle the numbers that defined this year.
Originally tweeted by The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) on March 8, 2021.