The Covid Tracking Project has been an incredible resource over the past year, seeking out and providing the kind of data the federal government should have been equipped to provide to help manage the pandemic. Now that there are systems in place to collect and publish data on a national level, they are winding the data collection part of the project down.

Every day for almost a year, hundreds of COVID Tracking Project contributors from all walks of life have compiled, published, and interpreted vitally important COVID-19 data as a service to their fellow Americans. On March 7, the one-year anniversary of our founding, we will release our final daily update and our data compilation will stop. Documentation, analysis, and archival work will continue for another two months, and we will bring the project to a close in May.

The seeds of this choice have been with us from the beginning. From its inception, this project was both unlikely and unprecedented: No one expected a volunteer pop-up collective to publish and interpret public health data for the United States for the first year of a global pandemic. We began the work out of necessity and planned to do it for a couple of weeks at most, always in the expectation that the federal public health establishment would make our work obsolete. Every few months through the course of the project, we asked ourselves whether it was possible to wind down. Instead, we saw the federal government continue to publish patchy and often ill-defined data while our world-famous public health agencies remained sidelined and underfunded, their leadership seemingly inert.

The work going forward will be what the work of the fourth estate should be — investigating, holding account, asking hard questions.

It’s obviously not a coincidence that the federal government is under new leadership. American healthcare was in terrible shape before Trump, but his malfeasance and complete ineptitude made any kind of coordination impossible. The Biden administration inherits that, as well as the patchwork healthcare system that predates it, and will wok to improve access to vital information, while the Covid Tracking project will focus on reporting and accountability. The work they’ve done on race and ethnicity, for example, shows one possible path forward.

What an incredible project, built by volunteers and started with a single spreadsheet to try to understand what in the world was happening in the face of a grossly incompetent president who refused to acknowledge reality. We owe them our gratitude.