About us

The COVID Tracking Project is a volunteer organization launched from The Atlantic and dedicated to collecting and publishing the data required to understand the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States.

Every day, we collect data on COVID-19 testing and patient outcomes from all 50 states, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia. Our dataset is currently in use by national and local news organizations across the US and by research projects and agencies worldwide. As of mid-April, our data API (which allows sites and apps to import our dataset automatically) receives about one million requests per day.

On April 15, we launched the COVID Racial Data Tracker, a partnership between the COVID Tracking Project and the The Antiracist Research & Policy Center that collects, publishes, and analyzes racial data on the pandemic within the United States.

How we got here

In early March, two journalists at The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, built a tracker for their investigation into lagging COVID-19 testing rates. Separately, Jeff Hammerbacher, Founder and General Partner at Related Sciences, built a tracking spreadsheet of his own. The two efforts came together March 7 and made a call for volunteers, and the COVID Tracking Project was born.

Alexis Madrigal now leads the project. Jeff Hammerbacher has mostly returned to his work and we send eternal gratitude his way. Erin Kissane is our managing editor. Since early March, 2020, we have grown from a tiny team with a spreadsheet to a project with hundreds of volunteer data-gatherers, developers, scientists, reporters, designers, editors, and other dedicated contributors.

Our advisory board

The COVID Tracking Project advisory board helps guide and provide accountability for the initiative. The current members are:

Trevor Bedford, Associate Member at the Fred Hutch in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division and the Computational Biology Program, Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of Genome Sciences and the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington, co-developer of NextStrain.org
Natalie Dean, PhD, assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida
Jeff Hammerbacher, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, founder Related Sciences
Tony Iton, MD, JD, MPH, Senior Vice President of Healthy Communities at the California Endowment
Erin Kissane, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, former director of content for Knight-Mozilla OpenNews,
Robinson Meyer, staff writer at The Atlantic
Ryan Panchadsaram, Kleiner Perkins, former deputy CTO of the United States
Gillian White, deputy editor at The Atlantic
Marta E. Wosińska, PhD, Deputy Director, Policy at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy and Consulting Professor at the Fuqua School of Business

Team leads

Contributors

We can’t list them all for privacy reasons, but here are some of our stalwart contributors:

Are you a volunteer who wants to be added to this list? Edit your profile in Slack and scroll down to "Volunteer web page."

Past contributors

Lucas Gonze
Dustin Preisler