COVID Tracking Project


The COVID Tracking Project is a collaborative volunteer-run effort to track the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. It maintains a regularly updated database of a variety of types of state-level information related to the outbreak, including counts of the number of positive and negative test results obtained in each state, hospitalization and outcome data for cases, and the racial and ethnic demographic breakdowns of cases and deaths.
Data is updated by hand from "state health departments, local news reports and live news conferences", according to The New York Times.
The project reports data from all states, the District of Columbia, and five US territories.

History

In early March 2020, two journalists, Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, started constructing a COVID-19 tracking spreadsheet for their investigation in the Atlantic, after not finding a unified official source for case data with daily updates. Around the same time, data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher was independently working on a similar tracking spreadsheet, and the COVID Tracking Project was formed when these two projects merged on March 7, 2020. They invited the public to contribute, and most aspects of the project are organized and run by teams of volunteers. Madrigal leads the project, and Erin Kissane joined as its managing editor; Hammerbacher remains an advisor and volunteer.
The project continued to be developed as a shared spreadsheet, with an API for easier reuse by other tools. It expanded the range of data points it was gathering as they were reported by a majority of states. In May 2020, the CDC released for the first time their own dashboard with state-by-state breakdowns of cases and tests. The project published a comparison of the data compiled by the CDC with the data reported by the states.