Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day seventy six
Speaker 1: since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Our main story.
Speaker 1: The US seems to have finally gotten its testing operation
Speaker 1: on track, but it's still hard to find data on
Speaker 1: just how many tests are being done, so a volunteer
Speaker 1: group of journalists took up the challenge. Now the group
Speaker 1: produces reports that are so reliable even the White House
Speaker 1: depends on that. But first, here's what happened today. The
Speaker 1: US drug giant Mark revealed its plans to develop a
Speaker 1: pill that will treat the coronavirus. The company is also
Speaker 1: working on two vaccines. Work bought the rights to develop
Speaker 1: a promising anti viral drug that was discovered at Emory University.
Speaker 1: Over the past century, Mark has pioneered inoculations for diseases
Speaker 1: from ebola to diphtheria. The company pledged that if they
Speaker 1: are able to make a coronavirus vaccine, they will work
Speaker 1: to make it accessible to anyone in the world who
Speaker 1: needs it. WU Want, the epicenter of China's coronavirus outbreak,
Speaker 1: said it tested nearly seven million people in twelve days.
Speaker 1: That's after a handful of infections prompted fears of a
Speaker 1: second wave and spurred a campaign to test the entire population.
Speaker 1: The six point eight million nucleic acid tests uncovered two
Speaker 1: hundred and six asymptomatic cases, according to Bloomberg calculations based
Speaker 1: on daily numbers released by the local Health Commission. And Finally,
Speaker 1: researchers may have found a small piece of the puzzle
Speaker 1: about whether people with COVID nineteen later become immune. An
Speaker 1: early draft of a study of hospital staff in northeastern
Speaker 1: France found that almost all doctors and nurses who got
Speaker 1: mild forms of COVID nineteen produced antibodies that could prevent reinfection.
Speaker 1: The research by Institute Pasteur and University Hospitals in Strasbourg
Speaker 1: addresses a crucial question regarding the new coronavirus, whether people
Speaker 1: who had COVID nineteen, and especially those who didn't get
Speaker 1: severely ill, develop antibodies against the disease. As recently as April,
Speaker 1: the World Health Organization said that there's no evidence yet
Speaker 1: that people who have recovered and have antibodies are protected
Speaker 1: from a second infection, And now our main story at
Speaker 1: the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The scathed number of
Speaker 1: virus tests being conducted in the US was a major fiasco.
Speaker 1: Now though most supply problems have been solved and many
Speaker 1: more tests are being done throughout the country, but it's
Speaker 1: still hard to get a sense of just how many.
Speaker 1: Knowing who is being tested is essential for getting an
Speaker 1: accurate picture of the spread of the virus, but the
Speaker 1: government hasn't readily provided this data. Instead, experts, media outlets,
Speaker 1: and even the Trump administration have turned to its surprising source,
Speaker 1: a volunteer effort by a team of journalists called the
Speaker 1: COVID Tracking Project. Bloomberg News reporter and a Court spoke
Speaker 1: with the project's co founder, Alexis Magical, about why he
Speaker 1: decided to chase these numbers and what they're telling us
Speaker 1: about who with the virus is affecting. Alexis Magical started
Speaker 1: paying close attention to the data on COVID nineteen in
Speaker 1: early March Alexis as a reporter for The Atlantic. He
Speaker 1: found that a month after the first confirmed case of
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen in the US, the country's numbers on the
Speaker 1: infections were way too low. A friend of his from college,
Speaker 1: Jeff Hammerbacker, was also watching the subject closely, so they
Speaker 1: joined together to create the COVID Tracking Project. It's a
Speaker 1: volunteer led effort based out of The Atlantic magazine that
Speaker 1: gathers state level data about testing cases, deaths, and hospitalizations.
Speaker 1: The project also tracts race and ethnicity data when possible.
Speaker 1: That's time consuming work. In the early days, it was
Speaker 1: just Alexis Robinson mayor his colleague at The Atlantic, Jeff
Speaker 1: and some other volunteers like co founder Aaron Cassane. They
Speaker 1: were all working around the clock. I spoke with Alexis
Speaker 1: about the project. The data collection effort, you know, is
Speaker 1: not that difficult to do once, right, you know, you
Speaker 1: go to all these state department state health department websites,
Speaker 1: you write down a bunch of information and a spreadsheet. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, doing that one time. You know, anyone can
Speaker 1: imagine doing that. You know, lots of reporters have done
Speaker 1: this with different kinds of COVID nineteen data, and you can.
Speaker 1: You can do it once. But now let's say you
Speaker 1: need to do it three times a day for a month.
Speaker 1: You can't have the same person doing it like that.
Speaker 1: No one person is going to survive that, No small
Speaker 1: team is going to survive that the relentlessness of it,
Speaker 1: you know, is just too tough. So now you've got
Speaker 1: to create rules for how you're going to code certain
Speaker 1: types of information. The states are all reporting things and
Speaker 1: very very different ways, and insofar as we can standardize
Speaker 1: those things, we try. You might imagine technology could be very,
Speaker 1: very useful in tracking COVID nineteen data, but Alexis says
Speaker 1: it's actually a highly manual process. Volunteers pull the numbers,
Speaker 1: and more volunteers double check their work. This requires systems
Speaker 1: to ensure data quality and train new volunteers. Basically a
Speaker 1: whole organization complete with Slack and Google Docs. The data
Speaker 1: is collected from public health authorities via official reports, as
Speaker 1: well as news conferences, Twitter, and other sources. Jordan's Gasparay,
Speaker 1: who produced the segment, is one of the many journalists
Speaker 1: from various outlets who contributed to this massive data collection effort.
Speaker 1: Alexis says that in an ideal world, the Centers for
Speaker 1: Disease Control and Prevention would be gathering and standardizing this
Speaker 1: crucial data, not an army of volunteers. In fact, he
Speaker 1: likes to call their group the pirates c DC. You know,
Speaker 1: these systems for gathering data at a you know, in
Speaker 1: a country as large as the United States with a
Speaker 1: healthcare system is fragmented as it is, are just remarkably difficult.
Speaker 1: And a lot of it is voluntary reporting, which means,
Speaker 1: you know, even if the federal government says to states like, hey,
Speaker 1: can you please report all of your data to us,
Speaker 1: the hospitals in that state just may not do that. Um,
Speaker 1: they should do that, but they may not do that,
Speaker 1: you know. And the same goes for like race and
Speaker 1: ethnicity data and things like that. People just don't fill
Speaker 1: it out. They don't fill out when they're ordering a test,
Speaker 1: they just don't fill out race and ethnicity on the form.
Speaker 1: And so the kind of data holes that begin, you know,
Speaker 1: with small actions, you know, down at the point of care,
Speaker 1: blow up to you know, on the national scale, to
Speaker 1: be these massive data holes that don't allow us to
Speaker 1: to you know, truly understand what's going on with the
Speaker 1: outbreak or or how to respond to it. Even the
Speaker 1: Trump administration has cited numbers from the COVID tracking project,
Speaker 1: As my colleague Kristen V. Brown and I have reported,
Speaker 1: the White House released a nationwide testing strategy document in
Speaker 1: late April that credits data to Alexis and his colleagues project.
Speaker 1: The Trump administration didn't return our request for comments about
Speaker 1: this or answer our questions about where it's data is
Speaker 1: coming from, but the administration has previously released numbers on
Speaker 1: testing that roughly match up to the COVID tracking projects reporting.
Speaker 1: I asked Alexis if the federal government is using the
Speaker 1: project's data, and whether the White House has its own
Speaker 1: source of COVID nineteen information. What I choose to believe
Speaker 1: is that the federal government has data um and that
Speaker 1: some of it is way better than ours, even but
Speaker 1: that perhaps our data has its own kinds of utility,
Speaker 1: like stretching back in time and standardizing in certain ways
Speaker 1: and sort of allowing the federal government to understand how
Speaker 1: the states are reporting this relative to how they are
Speaker 1: seeing data come in. I don't know. I mean that
Speaker 1: the truth is I don't know the answer to these questions.
Speaker 1: But but you know, just having been around this testing
Speaker 1: data and talk to enough people who are in diagnostic
Speaker 1: labs and other kinds of reporting, I think there's a
Speaker 1: zero percent chance the federal government has nothing. But the
Speaker 1: fact that there's nothing public means they probably don't have
Speaker 1: everything for whatever reason. All of this matters because widespread
Speaker 1: testing is understood to be key to measuring the number
Speaker 1: of COVID nineteen cases and reopening the economy as safely
Speaker 1: as possible. Without mass testing, experts can't be confident in
Speaker 1: the number of cases that have been reported. And while
Speaker 1: the White House has long insisted that the US has
Speaker 1: excelled at testing, getting a complete, up to date picture
Speaker 1: of how it's all going has often been difficult. We
Speaker 1: don't have a good idea of how many people are sick.
Speaker 1: That's why. But part of what's happening is that you know,
Speaker 1: New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. You know, the New
Speaker 1: York metro area had a blazing outbreak that caught the
Speaker 1: entire nation, entire world by surprise because of the botched
Speaker 1: early testing efforts in the United States, they were only
Speaker 1: testing very sick people until you know, one out of
Speaker 1: every two people was coming back positive. Now what's happening
Speaker 1: is the outbreak is growing outside of those um three places.
Speaker 1: But we but we have better eyes on it because
Speaker 1: there's more testing capacity now than there was in the
Speaker 1: beginning of March. Testing grew to become one of the
Speaker 1: biggest crises in the US in the first months of
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen, and even though the country's testing abilities have improved,
Speaker 1: many problems have lingered, including around capacity. I would like
Speaker 1: to say that we had far seeing vision and we
Speaker 1: of course knew that this would be the crucial issue
Speaker 1: of this entire pandemic, But it's not true. I mean,
Speaker 1: and for me, it's not true. My reporting partner, Rob
Speaker 1: Meyer at The Atlantic, he immediately identified. He was like,
Speaker 1: this is the most important number in America right now,
Speaker 1: is how many people have been tested? UM. He did
Speaker 1: say that at the time. Uh, And so I will say,
Speaker 1: perhaps Rob knew that this would be this big. But
Speaker 1: to be honest, in the weeks moving through March, when
Speaker 1: there was all this talk about the scale up and
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah blah, I did not think that
Speaker 1: it would that testing would continue to be a number
Speaker 1: that was so deeply important. I really didn't. I thought
Speaker 1: that the project would probably wrap up UM sometime in April,
Speaker 1: either because the CDC came or it just didn't matter
Speaker 1: anymore because testing availability was so enormous. And then basically
Speaker 1: every report that came out in April basically said like, actually,
Speaker 1: we need millions of tests to safely reopen this country.
Speaker 1: And like when every expert is to saying with something
Speaker 1: like that, you go like, well, damn, I guess this
Speaker 1: really is it. The US can now do about four
Speaker 1: hundred thousand tests a day, less than half the nine
Speaker 1: hundred thousand one group of experts says is needed. That's
Speaker 1: the case even as states pushed towards reopening their economies,
Speaker 1: sending people back to work in school and eating at restaurants.
Speaker 1: There's where we are with testing right now in the US.
Speaker 1: We tested less than two thousand people total by March six.
Speaker 1: You know, we entered April doing you know, just about
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand tests a day. We left April doing
Speaker 1: you know, about two hundred thousand tests a day. But
Speaker 1: most of April was a big long plateau actually, and
Speaker 1: it was only really at the end of the month
Speaker 1: um that testing started to pick up. You know, most
Speaker 1: testing now is done by lab corps and Quest and
Speaker 1: other you know, big sort of commercial laboratories. Alexis says
Speaker 1: he's a believer that once the American innovation system gets
Speaker 1: cranking along, testing numbers will eventually take off. Over the
Speaker 1: next few months. He says we'll get there, maybe even
Speaker 1: stand out on a global level. But Alexis also says
Speaker 1: it's possible that by trying to bring on testing while
Speaker 1: also reopening, there will be massive outbreaks and major damage
Speaker 1: done along the way. That's kind of how it looks
Speaker 1: to me. It looks like a race between sort of
Speaker 1: our innovative capacities, you know, and are kind of reactionary
Speaker 1: impulses to just try and get everything to go back
Speaker 1: to normal even though it's clearly not going to happen.
Speaker 1: That was in the court and that's our show today.
Speaker 1: For coverage of the outbreak from one buros around the world,
Speaker 1: visit Bloomberg dot com, slash coronavirus and if you like
Speaker 1: the show, please leave us a review at a rating
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Speaker 1: help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily
Speaker 1: edition is produced by Topher Foreheads, Jordan gas Pure, Magnus
Speaker 1: Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported
Speaker 1: by Emma Court. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors
Speaker 1: are Francesco Levi and Rick Shine. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's
Speaker 1: head of podcasts, Thanks for listening. One