At the twelve-month mark of the pandemic in the United States, COVID Tracking Project co-founder Alexis Madrigal looks both backward and forward in a wide-ranging conversation with Brian Stelter. Madrigal says the volunteer pop-up collective "stumbled into a real gap in our pandemic preparedness and then have done our best to fill it." But it was necessary because of the federal government’s failures. “Going state by state” and gathering the data “in the way that we did really put us in touch with the realities of this country right now, and not our myths about how great we are,” he says. Madrigal also explains why it is now possible to “sunset” the daily data reporting, and what more still needs to be done.

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