Johns Hopkins Now Compiling U.S. COVID Testing Data

Johns Hopkins University's Coronavirus Resource Center (CRC) now houses United States COVID-19 testing data — taking the reins from the COVID Tracking Project, which has compiled the data from publicly reported sources for the past year.

The COVID Tracking Project is a volunteer effort launched out of The Atlantic in the early days of the pandemic, dedicated to collecting and publishing vital public health data for the U.S. — because at the time federal agencies weren't up to the job, according to the project's founders. "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," they explained in a recent blog post. "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."

Now, the Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have improved their data efforts to the point that the COVID Tracking Project is coming to an end. "Compiling, cleaning, standardizing, and making sense of COVID-19 data from 56 individual states and territories … is properly the work of federal public health agencies," the project founders stated. "Although substantial gaps and complexities remain, we have seen persuasive evidence that the CDC and HHS are now both able and willing to take on the country's massive deficits in public health data infrastructure, and to offer the best available data and science communication in the interim."

Johns Hopkins' CRC will now draw on data from local, state and federal sources rather than from the COVID Tracking Project, adding state testing data collection to its existing efforts. The Center's mission remains to "aggregate and analyze the best data available on COVID-19 — including cases, deaths, tests, contact tracing, and vaccinations — to help the public, policymakers and healthcare professionals worldwide respond to the pandemic."

For more information, visit the Coronavirus Resource Center site.

About the Author

Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • abstract illustration of a glowing AI-themed bar graph on a dark digital background with circuit patterns

    Stanford 2025 AI Index Reveals Surge in Adoption, Investment, and Global Impact as Trust and Regulation Lag Behind

    Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) has released its AI Index Report 2025, measuring AI's diverse impacts over the past year.

  • modern college building with circuit and brain motifs

    Anthropic Launches Claude for Education

    Anthropic has announced a version of its Claude AI assistant tailored for higher education institutions. Claude for Education "gives academic institutions secure, reliable AI access for their entire community," the company said, to enable colleges and universities to develop and implement AI-enabled approaches across teaching, learning, and administration.

  • lightbulb

    Call for Speakers Now Open for Tech Tactics in Education: Overcoming Roadblocks to Innovation

    The annual virtual conference from the producers of Campus Technology and THE Journal will return on September 25, 2025, with a focus on emerging trends in cybersecurity, data privacy, AI implementation, IT leadership, building resilience, and more.

  • From Fire TV to Signage Stick: University of Utah's Digital Signage Evolution

    Jake Sorensen, who oversees sponsorship and advertising and Student Media in Auxiliary Business Development at the University of Utah, has navigated the digital signage landscape for nearly 15 years. He was managing hundreds of devices on campus that were incompatible with digital signage requirements and needed a solution that was reliable and lowered labor costs. The Amazon Signage Stick, specifically engineered for digital signage applications, gave him the stability and design functionality the University of Utah needed, along with the assurance of long-term support.