“I don’t want this job.”
It had already been March and Lauren Gardner, an engineer and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, questioned her resolve to create an online dashboard to track COVID-19 instances and deaths around the world. She and her team had spent a long afternoon in January navigating local news resources in China, with the goal of creating a set of knowledge that other researchers could use. Before posting a link to his paintings on Twitter, Gardner had taken a resolution to see the knowledge on a map to facilitate analysis. “Humans are terrible in terms of statistics,” she says, “and presenting raw numbers is complicated.”
Even some of the world’s leading medical experts continue to struggle to gain accurate knowledge of the new coronavirus. In May, for example, the CDC reported that California had conducted 925,000 tests, while the California Department of Public Health said it had conducted more than 1.1 million tests. According to the COVID Tracking Project, CDC numbers also differed from more than 150,000 digits of state tests in Florida, Massachusetts, and Texas.
“CDC provides all this knowledge, adding deaths by race, location, and age,” says Andy Slavitt, who was an interim administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Obama. “We don’t ask for perfection, just transparency. Currently, medical providers and hospitals don’t even provide CDC insight into effective treatments.”
This has left entrepreneurial researchers like Gardner with the difficult task of locating and verifying local resources of coronavirus knowledge and then updating them as new numbers flow. It’s an endless process, especially on such a global scale, yet Gardner is committed to keeping its board up-to-date and available to everyone. His team has grown from two graduate academics to two dozen, as well as faculty, university staff and mapping software provider Esri and Amazon Web Services. Since February, she has been awakened through a lot of emails from around the world, some loose and others complaining of inaccuracies. (Site visitors in France were not easy with respect to perceived delays in their calculations, and after complaining on social media, he followed state department naming conventions for disputed states such as Taiwan.) Gardner herself is too aware of the problems. “These are only reported instances; those are not genuine instances,” he says of the numbers on his dashboard. “There are probably 10 to 20 times more instances in the world than is reported on our dashboard. Almost certainly. It has begun to standardize knowledge so that visitors can perceive the spread of COVID-19 through more useful measures, such as occurrence rates, case case rates, and check and hospitalization rates in the United States.
In the absence of strong, centralized leadership in public fitness, and in the presence of virtual platforms that thrive on misinformation, Gardner increasingly believes it is the role of individual scientists to express themselves, whether on television or Twitter. “While it takes a long time and distracts me, I think it’s my duty to calculate the things I know, just seeing [celebrities like] Jenny McCarthy tell other people they shouldn’t get vaccinated,” she says. “You have to get there.”
Now more than ever, he believes that scientists use statistics, correct contextualized statistics, to paint an image that the public can understand. “Why isn’t there a national dataset on county-level immunization?” She asks. He recently built one for measles.
Senior Ainsley Harris joined Fast Company in 2014. Follow her on Twitter on @ainsleyoc.
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