I am once again asking: why are journalists doing this?

President Trump and the First Lady tested positive for COVID-19 in the early morning on Friday, October 2. As I draft this newsletter on Sunday morning, at least 15 other people connected to the President have tested positive, ranging from Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, to New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Shear.

You might expect me to source this number and these names from a federal public health agency, which is conducting all of these tests and making their results public. Not in this pandemic! My source is, of course, a dashboard compiled by volunteer journalists and science communicators.

This dashboard, called the COVID-19 At The White House Contact Tracker, is attempting to trace over 200 contacts in connection with the President and his staff. The team behind it includes Benjy Renton, independent reporter on COVID-19 in higher education, Peter Walker, data visualization lead at the COVID Tracking Project, and Jesse O’Shea, MD, infectious disease expert at Emory University.

The Contact Tracker is an incredible public service. In its current form, the dashboard lists 235 White House contacts who should get tested for COVID-19, along with their positions, test results (if known), symptoms (if they test positive), and the date of their most recent test. You can also view the data as a timeline, based on each person’s last contact with the President, and as a map based on the Rose Garden ceremony, the debate, and two other potential spreading events.

It is not surprising, after months of poor data reporting from the federal government that, instead of the CDC or the HHS, the best source of data on this high-profile outbreak is—as Dr. O’Shea puts it— “three awesome dudes [contact tracing] from our homes.” But it is worth emphasizing.

Instead, they got three awesome dudes doing it from our homes 😎 https://t.co/5Wv8WgTX58

— Jesse O’Shea MD, MSc (@JesseOSheaMD) October 4, 2020

Because this is potentially a national super spreader event, the federal government should be emulating this great work by @PeterJ_Walker.

Attendees of these events were from all across the country.

Transparency is key for effective contact tracing and quarantining. https://t.co/rxBtxPv4r7

— Ryan Panchadsaram (@rypan) October 3, 2020

we are seeing a super spreader event of high-profile politicians driven by a supreme court ceremony, & the best source of data on the outbreak is a tableau dashboard thrown together by a couple of independent journalists!!! not surprising at this point but it has to be said!!!!

— betsy ladyzhets 🌳📊 (@betsyladyzhets) October 3, 2020

What are federal public health agencies prioritizing right now, you might ask? The HHS is planning a $300 million-plus ad campaign with the goal of “defeating despair” about the coronavirus. And this money came out of the CDC’s budget. I was planning to devote a bigger section to this campaign before COVID-19 hit the White House, but instead, I will direct you to an excellent (and terrifying) POLITICO feature on the subject. Dan Diamond also discusses his investigation of the campaign on his podcast, POLITICO’s Pulse Check.