#103 – Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data

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Jun 21, 2021

Max Roser, an economist at Oxford University and the founder of Our World in Data, shares insights on his team's monumental effort in providing accessible COVID-19 data. He discusses transforming complex global metrics into user-friendly formats, which became crucial during the pandemic. Roser recounts early struggles with data visualization and the necessity of transparent information. He highlights the platform’s role in public understanding and emphasizes the importance of addressing data inequities for future health crises.

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ANECDOTE

Data Archaeology

Early in the pandemic, accessing COVID-19 data was a nightmare.
Data was scattered, inconsistent, and often presented as images on obscure government websites.

ANECDOTE

Spreadsheets and PDFs

Our World in Data began compiling COVID data in spreadsheets due to its inaccessibility elsewhere, including the WHO publishing data in PDFs.
Inconsistencies were glaring, with totals often not adding up.

ADVICE

Data as Infrastructure

Institutions should treat data output as another institution's input.
Don't just publish data without considering how others will access and use it.

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History is filled with stories of great people stepping up in times of crisis. Presidents averting wars; soldiers leading troops away from certain death; data scientists sleeping on the office floor to launch a new webpage a few days sooner.

That last one is barely a joke — by our lights, people like today’s guest Max Roser should be viewed with similar admiration by historians of COVID-19.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

Max runs Our World in Data, a small education nonprofit which began the pandemic with just six staff. But since last February his team has supplied essential COVID statistics to over 130 million users — among them BBC, The Financial Times, The New York Times, the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF, Donald Trump, Tedros Adhanom, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, just to name a few.

An economist at Oxford University, Max Roser founded Our World in Data as a small side project in 2011 and has led it since, including through the wild ride of 2020. In today's interview Max explains how he and his team realized that if they didn't start making COVID data accessible and easy to make sense of, it wasn't clear when anyone would.

Our World in Data wasn't naturally set up to become the world's go-to source for COVID updates. Up until then their specialty had been long articles explaining century-length trends in metrics like life expectancy — to the point that their graphing software was only set up to present yearly data.

But the team eventually realized that the World Health Organization was publishing numbers that flatly contradicted themselves, most of the press was embarrassingly out of its depth, and countries were posting case data as images buried deep in their sites where nobody would find them. Even worse, nobody was reporting or compiling how many tests different countries were doing, rendering all those case figures largely meaningless.

Trying to make sense of the pandemic was a time-consuming nightmare. If you were leading a national COVID response, learning what other countries were doing and whether it was working would take weeks of study — and that meant, with the walls falling in around you, it simply wasn't going to happen. Ministries of health around the world were flying blind.

Disbelief ultimately turned to determination, and the Our World in Data team committed to do whatever had to be done to fix the situation. Overnight their software was quickly redesigned to handle daily data, and for the next few months Max and colleagues like Edouard Mathieu and Hannah Ritchie did little but sleep and compile COVID data.

In this episode Max tells the story of how Our World in Data ran into a huge gap that never should have been there in the first place — and how they had to do it all again in December 2020 when, eleven months into the pandemic, there was nobody to compile global vaccination statistics.

We also talk about:

• Our World in Data's early struggles to get funding
• Why government agencies are so bad at presenting data
• Which agencies did a good job during the COVID pandemic (shout out to the European CDC)
• How much impact Our World in Data has by helping people understand the world
• How to deal with the unreliability of development statistics
• Why research shouldn't be published as a PDF
• Why academia under-incentivises data collection
• The history of war
• And much more

Chapters:
• Rob’s intro (00:00:00)
• The interview begins (00:01:41)
• Our World In Data (00:04:46)
• How OWID became a leader on COVID-19 information (00:11:45)
• COVID-19 gaps that OWID filled (00:27:45)
• Incentives that make it so hard to get good data (00:31:20)
• OWID funding (00:39:53)
• What it was like to be so successful (00:42:11)
• Vaccination data set (00:45:43)
• Improving the vaccine rollout (00:52:44)
• Who did well (00:58:08)
• Global sanity (01:00:57)
• How high-impact is this work? (01:04:43)
• Does this work get you anywhere in the academic system? (01:12:48)
• Other projects Max admires in this space (01:20:05)
• Data reliability and availability (01:30:49)
• Bringing together knowledge and presentation (01:39:26)
• History of war (01:49:17)
• Careers at OWID (02:01:15)
• How OWID prioritise topics (02:12:30)
• Rob's outro (02:21:02)

Producer: Keiran Harris.
Audio mastering: Ryan Kessler.
Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel.