Policy Punchline

Robinson Meyer is a staff writer and climate reporter at The Atlantic. After covering working on environmental policy and climate change for the last four years of his six years at the publication, Rob and a few of his colleagues at The Atlantic started the COVID Tracking Project in the early days of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, accumulating case counts and death tolls when information on the virus was scarce. The COVID Tracking Project has now grown into being a leading data aggregator for the general public, other news organizations, and local, state, and even federal government-affiliated groups. Rob also is the author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet. Rob describes the somewhat accidental realization of the COVID Tracking Project and the challenges of its early days. He talks about how the virus spread undetected, and how his team at The Atlantic started from scratch in constructing a network to understand the virus – starting with their collaboration with the Seattle Flu Project, and eventually evo