Data Heroes of Covid Tracking Project Are Still Filling U.S. Government Void

At the start of 2020, Amanda French was in between academic jobs. Her mother had died about a year earlier, and she’d taken time off to help settle her affairs. Then the pandemic hit, interrupting her employment search, and she was alone outside Raleigh, N.C., with little to do but doomscroll through Twitter, as she described it.

Someone she followed online put out a call for volunteers to assist with a new project tallying how many Covid tests were being run across the U.S.—something the public wasn’t getting a straight answer on from the federal government. “I had nothing to do. I was at home alone, anyways,” French says. “It was much healthier than reading all the scary news.” So on March 18, she signed up.