The Incubator for Media Education and Development, or iMedD, is a nonprofit based in Athens, Greece that supports new practices, credibility, and transparency in international journalism. I was lucky enough to meet Kelly Kiki, a journalist and project manager at iMedD’s content production arm, at the NICAR conference earlier this year.
Kelly has spent much of the past year compiling and reporting on Greek COVID-19 data; we found a lot of common ground in the challenges we have both faced, from discrepancies in regional numbers to a lack of data on cases in schools.
After an international Zoom call and many emails, Kelly wrote a profile of my work at the COVID-19 Data Dispatch. The profile was published on iMedD Lab’s site earlier this week—you can read it in English or in Greek!
The profile touches on why I started the CDD, how I compile each issue, and some of my thoughts on major COVID-19 data problems in the U.S.:
Asked about the quality of pandemic data in the US at both federal and state level, Ladyzhets tells us that what she perceives as one of the biggest problems is the fact that “in this country, we are not actually dealing with one singular, standardized system. We’re instead dealing with 56 smaller systems (50 states and 6 territories). Each system has its own rules, its own reporting practices, its own data definitions. All the systems have been underfunded for decades and were given very little guidance from the federal government… You really see this lack of leadership and consistency everywhere, from the fact that some states reported their tests in units of specimens while others reported in units of people, to the fact that two states are still not reporting race and ethnicity data for their vaccinated residents, even now, four months into the vaccination effort”.