Virus Hunting With the 'Pirate CDC'

depends on that. But first, here's what happened today. The US drug giant Mark revealed its plans to develop a pill that will treat the coronavirus. The company is also working on two vaccines. Work bought the rights to develop a promising anti viral drug that was discovered at Emory University. Over the past century, Mark has pioneered inoculations for diseases

from ebola to diphtheria. The company pledged that if they are able to make a coronavirus vaccine, they will work to make it accessible to anyone in the world who needs it. WU Want, the epicenter of China's coronavirus outbreak, said it tested nearly seven million people in twelve days. That's after a handful of infections prompted fears of a second wave and spurred a campaign to test the entire population.

The six point eight million nucleic acid tests uncovered two hundred and six asymptomatic cases, according to Bloomberg calculations based on daily numbers released by the local Health Commission. And Finally, researchers may have found a small piece of the puzzle

about whether people with COVID nineteen later become immune. An early draft of a study of hospital staff in northeastern France found that almost all doctors and nurses who got mild forms of COVID nineteen produced antibodies that could prevent reinfection. The research by Institute Pasteur and University Hospitals in Strasbourg addresses a crucial question regarding the new coronavirus, whether people who had COVID nineteen, and especially those who didn't get

severely ill, develop antibodies against the disease. As recently as April, the World Health Organization said that there's no evidence yet that people who have recovered and have antibodies are protected from a second infection, And now our main story at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The scathed number of virus tests being conducted in the US was a major fiasco.

Now though most supply problems have been solved and many more tests are being done throughout the country, but it's still hard to get a sense of just how many. Knowing who is being tested is essential for getting an accurate picture of the spread of the virus, but the government hasn't readily provided this data. Instead, experts, media outlets, and even the Trump administration have turned to its surprising source, a volunteer effort by a team of journalists called the

COVID Tracking Project. Bloomberg News reporter and a Court spoke with the project's co founder, Alexis Magical, about why he decided to chase these numbers and what they're telling us about who with the virus is affecting. Alexis Magical started paying close attention to the data on COVID nineteen in early March Alexis as a reporter for The Atlantic. He found that a month after the first confirmed case of COVID nineteen in the US, the country's numbers on the

infections were way too low. A friend of his from college, Jeff Hammerbacker, was also watching the subject closely, so they joined together to create the COVID Tracking Project. It's a volunteer led effort based out of The Atlantic magazine that gathers state level data about testing cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. The project also tracts race and ethnicity data when possible.

That's time consuming work. In the early days, it was just Alexis Robinson mayor his colleague at The Atlantic, Jeff and some other volunteers like co founder Aaron Cassane. They were all working around the clock. I spoke with Alexis about the project. The data collection effort, you know, is not that difficult to do once, right, you know, you go to all these state department state health department websites, you write down a bunch of information and a spreadsheet. Um,

you know, doing that one time. You know, anyone can imagine doing that. You know, lots of reporters have done this with different kinds of COVID nineteen data, and you can. You can do it once. But now let's say you need to do it three times a day for a month. You can't have the same person doing it like that. No one person is going to survive that, No small team is going to survive that the relentlessness of it,

you know, is just too tough. So now you've got to create rules for how you're going to code certain types of information. The states are all reporting things and very very different ways, and insofar as we can standardize those things, we try. You might imagine technology could be very, very useful in tracking COVID nineteen data, but Alexis says it's actually a highly manual process. Volunteers pull the numbers, and more volunteers double check their work. This requires systems

to ensure data quality and train new volunteers. Basically a whole organization complete with Slack and Google Docs. The data is collected from public health authorities via official reports, as well as news conferences, Twitter, and other sources. Jordan's Gasparay, who produced the segment, is one of the many journalists from various outlets who contributed to this massive data collection effort.

Alexis says that in an ideal world, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be gathering and standardizing this crucial data, not an army of volunteers. In fact, he likes to call their group the pirates c DC. You know, these systems for gathering data at a you know, in a country as large as the United States with a healthcare system is fragmented as it is, are just remarkably difficult.

And a lot of it is voluntary reporting, which means, you know, even if the federal government says to states like, hey, can you please report all of your data to us, the hospitals in that state just may not do that. Um, they should do that, but they may not do that, you know. And the same goes for like race and ethnicity data and things like that. People just don't fill it out. They don't fill out when they're ordering a test, they just don't fill out race and ethnicity on the form.

And so the kind of data holes that begin, you know, with small actions, you know, down at the point of care, blow up to you know, on the national scale, to be these massive data holes that don't allow us to to you know, truly understand what's going on with the

outbreak or or how to respond to it. Even the Trump administration has cited numbers from the COVID tracking project, As my colleague Kristen V. Brown and I have reported, the White House released a nationwide testing strategy document in late April that credits data to Alexis and his colleagues project.

The Trump administration didn't return our request for comments about this or answer our questions about where it's data is coming from, but the administration has previously released numbers on testing that roughly match up to the COVID tracking projects reporting. I asked Alexis if the federal government is using the project's data, and whether the White House has its own

source of COVID nineteen information. What I choose to believe is that the federal government has data um and that some of it is way better than ours, even but that perhaps our data has its own kinds of utility, like stretching back in time and standardizing in certain ways and sort of allowing the federal government to understand how the states are reporting this relative to how they are seeing data come in. I don't know. I mean that the truth is I don't know the answer to these questions.

But but you know, just having been around this testing data and talk to enough people who are in diagnostic labs and other kinds of reporting, I think there's a zero percent chance the federal government has nothing. But the fact that there's nothing public means they probably don't have everything for whatever reason. All of this matters because widespread testing is understood to be key to measuring the number of COVID nineteen cases and reopening the economy as safely

as possible. Without mass testing, experts can't be confident in the number of cases that have been reported. And while the White House has long insisted that the US has excelled at testing, getting a complete, up to date picture of how it's all going has often been difficult. We don't have a good idea of how many people are sick. That's why. But part of what's happening is that you know,

New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. You know, the New York metro area had a blazing outbreak that caught the entire nation, entire world by surprise because of the botched early testing efforts in the United States, they were only testing very sick people until you know, one out of every two people was coming back positive. Now what's happening is the outbreak is growing outside of those um three places.

But we but we have better eyes on it because there's more testing capacity now than there was in the beginning of March. Testing grew to become one of the biggest crises in the US in the first months of COVID nineteen, and even though the country's testing abilities have improved, many problems have lingered, including around capacity. I would like to say that we had far seeing vision and we of course knew that this would be the crucial issue of this entire pandemic, But it's not true. I mean,

and for me, it's not true. My reporting partner, Rob Meyer at The Atlantic, he immediately identified. He was like, this is the most important number in America right now, is how many people have been tested? UM. He did say that at the time. Uh, And so I will say,

perhaps Rob knew that this would be this big. But to be honest, in the weeks moving through March, when there was all this talk about the scale up and blah blah blah blah blah, I did not think that it would that testing would continue to be a number that was so deeply important. I really didn't. I thought that the project would probably wrap up UM sometime in April, either because the CDC came or it just didn't matter

anymore because testing availability was so enormous. And then basically every report that came out in April basically said like, actually, we need millions of tests to safely reopen this country. And like when every expert is to saying with something like that, you go like, well, damn, I guess this really is it. The US can now do about four hundred thousand tests a day, less than half the nine

hundred thousand one group of experts says is needed. That's the case even as states pushed towards reopening their economies, sending people back to work in school and eating at restaurants. There's where we are with testing right now in the US. We tested less than two thousand people total by March six. You know, we entered April doing you know, just about a hundred thousand tests a day. We left April doing

you know, about two hundred thousand tests a day. But most of April was a big long plateau actually, and it was only really at the end of the month um that testing started to pick up. You know, most testing now is done by lab corps and Quest and other you know, big sort of commercial laboratories. Alexis says he's a believer that once the American innovation system gets cranking along, testing numbers will eventually take off. Over the next few months. He says we'll get there, maybe even

stand out on a global level. But Alexis also says it's possible that by trying to bring on testing while also reopening, there will be massive outbreaks and major damage done along the way. That's kind of how it looks to me. It looks like a race between sort of our innovative capacities, you know, and are kind of reactionary impulses to just try and get everything to go back to normal even though it's clearly not going to happen. That was in the court and that's our show today.

For coverage of the outbreak from one buros around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com, slash coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review at a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Topher Foreheads, Jordan gas Pure, Magnus Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Emma Court. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors

are Francesco Levi and Rick Shine. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts, Thanks for listening. One