Even the White House and the British prime minister were relying on Hopkins data. Johns Hopkins "essentially filled the vacuum," Khan says, "That was invaluable to understand what was going on."Īfter Johns Hopkins launched the project, the website quickly became crucial for deciding everything from where drug companies should test vaccines to where Hollywood should film movies. "So it was unusual that at the beginning of this COVID pandemic that they did not collect this data and put it out in a timely manor. Ali Khan, a former CDC official who is now dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "I know CDC has the ability to do this and has done it numerous occasions in the past," says Dr. This was not the case early in the pandemic. 1, NPR ceased updating the page, recognizing that Americans can find the information they need on the CDC's COVID website. It was viewed over 52 million times over the last three years as readers sought to stay updated on COVID metrics. NPR launched its own tracker in March, 2020, drawing data from Johns Hopkins. So journalists and academic researchers at places like Johns Hopkins jumped in to fill the void. Neither the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor the World Health Organization were providing enough useful numbers in real time. Should mayors close schools? Should governors mandate masks? Should CEOs shut down factories? Should heads of state seal borders?īut there was no good data available to make those decisions. Those decisions included where to impose dramatic but crucial public health measures. "And when we started to see the cases move out of China and in through Europe and headed toward our shores, we knew that there were going to be a series of public policy decisions that would have to be made," Blauer says. "As everyone can remember, there was very little information, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic," says Beth Blauer, an associate vice provost at Johns Hopkins who has helped run the center. Was it safe to go grocery shopping? How easily could someone get infected on a bus or train? Could runners get sick just by passing another jogger in the park? When the pandemic erupted, no one knew much of anything about the virus and how to respond. "But it's an appropriate time to move on." "It's bittersweet," says Lauren Gardner, an engineering professor who launched the project with one of her students on March 3, 2020. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center plans to cease operations March 10, officials told NPR. In another sign of the changing state of the pandemic, an invaluable source of information about the virus over the last three years is shutting down, NPR has learned.
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