From the New York Times unworkable borrow. This is today for months, the: U S, government has been quietly collecting information on hundreds of thousands of Koona virus cases across the country, my colleague Robert Gavel off on the story of how the times of teen that data it's Wednesday Goliath. Where were you live in a corner of the times that attitude? But I'm not sure most people understand all that. Well, so when the pin

MAX starts. How do you all respond so by training? My goal is to find stories that can best be told through data did not every story, but there's a lot of stories out there. So if you go back to early March, the pandemic is starting,

and I know that our job as in your times, is to really get our arms around what's going on and by that to start collecting the data that is starting to come out about cases in that surround the country. So my colleagues set up a team of people across different departments whose primary job would be to monitor all the states, all the major counties and gather the information and start to build a database start to say we're getting information from New York over here and calve when you over here, but let's put it into one database just for the purpose of

racking where the cases were where the deaths were using its not coming out on a national level. There's no big clearing house, that's gonna hand, you data every day about exactly where the virus is all across the country correct and at that point We assume that some kind of federal system may be in the offing, but we work in a way and part of our report. Every day, you'll see on our website are maps showing. The cases are where new cases are where deaths are where the new hot spots are, that all emanated from these early days of creating this ground level system for being able to collect this data and one, if you can take me into the process of that a little bit, I mean

What does it look like? Where exactly is the information coming from? Well, it's really like a hive of activity. I mean that's the way I like to think of it. You have at any given time a team of clerks reporters editors all assigned to on a tour what gets announced in various parts of the country. So at one moment you could have somebody wrestling with new data that was put out by California and trying to get it into a format that matches our data standards, and you could have somebody in Miss the be confused about whether the new data announced is key motive, or is it new cases for the day, and often that involves basic reporting of going back to the state

and asking questions then, while all this is going on and people are collecting this data, we have other people trying to put the data in the contacts it's out truly this whole new, full time operation just devoted to trying to track what is really happening with the pandemic and to do the awesome surveillance on the national picture. The sounds very tedious, incremental gathering up tiny bits of data cleaning it making sure it all lines up, not sexy. It is not sexy at all the it's when your data journalists, the fun part, is doing what we call the queries asking questions of the day.

Dancing what it shows, but we all know like job one is to make sure your data good. Otherwise, the questions you ass will mean anything and would you begin to learn through this? Damn right. Part of what my my personal job is to do is to look at this data and try and help understand what it tells us know. For example, one of the early findings we had when we are looking at the pandemic in March was it seemed to be hitting mostly in big cities and New York New Orleans Detroit Seattle, Seattle,

It seemed to be in places where the lot of population density, but it also there was also a another class, a place that seem to be popping up and it was resort counties places with ski resorts, and so that led us to this insight that it wasn't just population density that there are other possible explanations for why places got hit. Then, as the weeks went on, we began to see the filling. What I call a feeling which there were all of these new counties that were starting to get cases and, though, by having this what we were able to them report is There are now hundreds of rural counties getting their first cases,

and you know how were they preparing and how are they talking to people and then another thing we've been monitoring is there seems to be this ideological difference, or at least there there has been about how serious a problem is it how soon The government reopen or allow businesses to reopen and write a red state. Blue state divide over shutting down a reopening right, but our reporting showed that there was an additional element involved, which was for the first six to eight weeks of the pandemic. There were hardly any red counties with high infection rates and most

the hard hit places were and counties, and so we were able to raise the spectre of if you live in a place that doesn't have first hand experience with the virus, you don't have your emergency rooms being overflowed. Maybe that also contributes to your belief that you know what we should open the economy. This is not worth shutting down the economy for, and all these types of stories are again driven by the idea that in the first place, we had good County double data that we couldn't get anywhere else. That allowed us to look at the world through these different prisms and ass different questions about how the pandemic was playing out Your laying a clear examples of why data like this is important and what it lets us understand. But I'm curious what the limitations of this kind of a database are. What is it not tell us? Yes, so think of it. This way

it is said we think of like any other source that we're going to interview and we think of what might this source be able to tell us about something and we think of questions that were asked the source, so the problem became. We have, This data set and we knew where the cases were and the best were, but we can ask at any other questions we could ask who were the people actually becoming infected count where they old, with a young, where they rich, where they poor. Where front line workers where they white, where they black with latino. So all these questions we had, we couldn't really ask the data that we had. So what are you So on the way we work-

that the CDC actually had some information. That would be helpful in this. In that every time a person was confirmed have grown a virus infection. The local health agency would fill out a report that would have characteristics of the case: the person, the age, the race and the format. Billy ass dozens of questions here was the person at work. Was the person staying home? What were the symptoms and that these forms ultimately ended up at the CDC? And if we could get our hands on this data, we could ask a lot more questions about how this pandemic is playing out, and so we decided to approach the CDC.

And request axis and here's what we needed at their. So many people in this country are getting sick, some People are dying and our job is to try and explain who is it that is getting sick? Who is dying? And why? And if we have any chance of getting answers to those questions need, the best data and the CDC Heather Data we wanted to get a copy ourselves. And so how do you go about trying to get it well, in this case, we ended up soon, all the back.

But you can use a snack right about now how about a toast grill cheese sandwich just be warned, if you happen to achieve gooey, cheesy perfection, you may be inspired to upgrade your tiny drab kitchen only you won't be able to do it alone in this moment of new found passion, the people of. U S. Bank wanna help no matter what your car, up their dedicated to turning your new inspiration into your next pursued. U s back housing under member. If icy, this is John Illegal, I'm a national correspond with the New York Times and I cover issues of race. What I'm trying to do is how people understand how races lived in America. I'm writing our people, whose experiences with voices are often

the side and ignored, because I truly believe that you don't really have all the context you need to understand our country and our world unless you hear from these people, unless you see what they see and you feel what they feel like. I do every time about the field, I want to make sure that we tell the stories of the marginalized of the oppressed with the same respect and dignity, that we tell the story of politicians, businesspeople and other people in power, and if this kind of work is important too, that I would ask you to support us by subscribing in Europe times. You can do that at an why times that calm, slash, subscribe. Sir Robert, why did the New York Times sue the CDC so suing? The CDC sounds very dramatic, but in fact

many many times in the course of the year. We go to court to establish our rights to get public information. It's some more routine than most people would realise, and sometimes it's because the government out now refuses to give up the information. But in this case it was more to do with the timing. Without going to court and putting pressure on the agency, we were looking at the prospect of waiting months to get our hands on this information, but by going to court it sort of put the cock on and we had the agency's full attention, and so one ends up happening once the clock is ticking. And a judge's looking over the shoulders of the CDC. So the CDC tells us that they will comply. They just need to do a little more research as to what they can possibly produce, taking into consideration the privacy of people

who are in the database and stripping out personally identifiable information, but ultimately the day, comes where they say. Ok to your times. Here is a database of one point, four or five million cases that we have collected from state local authorities and We were then free to have a new interview subject and be able to ask it a whole lot of more interesting and detailed questions right. I mean this quite literally sounds like the mother Lode of data spent up, I can unite, is well in many ways. It was What we were able to see from this was detailed information about individuals who had become infected and died, and for each individual

We were able to look at their age, the county. They lived in the race in their ethnicity, and that is far more information than we had before and in the end we ended up being able to break down cases for nearly a thousand county covering more than half of the? U S? Population, and this number one and a half. Million Americans how big a proportion of all cases of the virus is that so far, the time period covered by the data. It was all cases through the end of May. It was about eighty eight percent of all cases that we had some information about. So when you get this massive data, what do you do? What you find, So when we,

Finally, had our hands on this data, we were checking what types of information were included, how complete the information was, and just looking at the data, many different ways to see what it could tell us, and eventually, three main trends emerged. So what were those trance? So the first was just how pervasive the racial disparity was with us pandemic. Whatever knowledge people had that African Americans Latinos were becoming infected at a higher rate, although that was tied to big cities,

had released data right, but what we found is that this racial disparity pervades everywhere, whether you go from cities to suburbs, even into rural places, harm fact any place. We found where there is a significant ask: american population, almost all of them african american infection rates, were higher than the rate for whites same thing with Latinos any place we found where there is a significant lahti, no population for almost all of them. The infection rate was higher for letting us the second big take away is what is driving these racial disparities so most

of the earliest explanations of the racial disparity were focused on death rates, and one of the explanations for the disparities in death rates. That commonly offered is something called co morbid. Who is the idea that African Americans might be dying at a higher rate? because they were more likely to have pre existing conditions or to be in poor health to begin with, but in our analysis, we we focused mostly on the actual infection rates, and the reason for that is that gets us out of the question of whether co morbidity is driving it and put us more on the question of who is most at risk to become infected in the first place, and so when we see disparities in the infection rates weakened,

then raised the question of: why are people in certain groups more likely to become infected and that led us to looking at? Where do people work, where do people live and what is your housing situation? And if you look at where people work and look at what the data shows, it shows that African Americans Latinos in the U S are far less likely to have the kind of where you can do it at all? They are more likely instead to have a job in the production sector in a factory or in the service sector. All that combined would increase your risk becoming infected and with housing. What we found is that Latinos in particular, are far more likely to live either with more people in the household or with a vast space in the household both,

which would also increase the odds of a person might become infected. So the second discovery very much helps understand the first. There are kind of structural issues around how Black and latino Americans work and live that contributors, Rachel disparity in the pandemic, that's correct, and the third take away. This is what you learn by looking at the pandemic through the prism of age right now, most of what we know about the disparity is all cases of people of age groups and that's how the rates are calculated. But if you realize something about this pandemic, it's that

older people are far more likely to get sick and die right and in the? U S. Right now. The older population is very disproportionately white non spanish. How? If you don't account for age you're by definition, almost understating the disparity. So what we did? What somebody me I'll just call age thing is look that infection rates across age groups and when you look at say what the infection rate is for people who are in the forties or in their fifties, the disparity is much bigger than you'll ever see in numbers, without age adjustment, so when you accounted for the fact that so many older people have died from the coroner and that the older population in this country skews why you found that the racial disparity actually gets even great correct, in fact

If you look at some of the younger age groups, the death rate for Latinos is about ten times higher than for whites. Now the caviar to that, of course, is you're much much less going to die at those age groups, but it still among the people who do Dinas age groups, its view heavily blackened with- I mean these insight- once again seem to highlight just how important it is to have this If information, because from what you're saying we have in some misunderstanding the rate disparities at this virus. The causes of the racial disparities. We haven't had access to this data. Well, at minimum you could say we ve didn't know the extent to which these problems existed. And getting data like this helps us sort of

define? What the ground truth is about how this pandemic is playing out? That being said, there are still a lot more that we would like to know. The database add one point: four, five million record. And it had for each record more than a hundred columns or a hundred pieces of information. Most of those were tank. That leaves us in the dark about a lot of questions that we'd like answered, like how many people are contracting the at work or how many are getting that from travelling or being a bars. So still a lot of room for improvement, and hopefully knowing what can be done. The power of having this data to answer questions will help inspire the CDC, the collecting information better and perhaps really said more quickly. I

to think that suing the CDC getting this data and reporting out these insights on race has increased pressure. The federal government to make this information more available. Is that true? I would like to think so. There is still some mystery as too what will ultimately happened? Our case is still pending. The status is the CDC at this point believes they said.

Five, a request right. Our lawyers are still investigating whether or not there was more information that should have been released or more types of information, and once that is resolved, the question will be: what is the CDC do going forward and bought a people in reaction to the store that published were asking me? Do you think they'll? Just start posting this on their own and I would think that whether or not the information is complete, it still better than anything else out there, and so hopefully we will see more of this type of information made them

That would definitely be beneficial to not just us, but to researchers around the nation in the world to have access to more complete and better information. But until that happens, we're going to keep doing what we've been doing. We're going to go

every day, gotta every step and collect data on the corona virus cases in that brought. Thank you very much. Thanks my on Tuesday, the latest updates to the Times database found that the virus has infected more than three million Americans and has killed more than a hundred and thirty thousand of them globally. It recorded newly twelve million infections annually five hundred and forty two thousand deaths, including sixty five thousand in Brazil, where the country's President Jai your boss in who has repeatedly downplayed the pandemic

and avoided wearing a mask, announced that he had tested positive for the virus water back every season. A behind the scenes pulls like the curtain on your favorite Netflix theories, and this time it's diving into the second season of the Umbrella Academy over five episodes. This podcast details how the show give made from graphic novelty script to screen and contains interviews Gerard way. The shows cast an spoilers so make sure you watch the series on Netflix before pressing play on the spot guest behind the scenes. Umbrella academy starts July. Twenty ninth so subscribed now, wherever you listen apart, guests.

A nation is used, and are you ready for the event for use in were ready for the event? Thirty, eight days ago, NASA and Spacex, launched two who s astronauts into space. On a mission, to the International space Station, where they join, a fellow American. It was the first. Time that a man spacecraft has left american soil in nearly a decade New York Times. This is mission control. Houston, please call station for a voice check on Tuesday I spoke with this. U S! Astronauts now aboard the space station allow New York Times there are times, is zero she'll space station, how to hear us Bob Banking and don't curly, who arrived a few weeks ago, along with Chris Cassidy, who has, there since April, we hear you loud and clear. How do you hear us we're here

loud and clear as well good afternoon welcome aboard, and we are happy to talk to you. Of course, their time and space is precious. Nasa gave us six minutes on the dawn. If I might boldly call you by your first names dog Cresson Bob. Thank you very much for for making time for us I wonder if you can start by telling us exactly where you are in space relative to us right now well well. Well, I kick things off. Bob's gonna, pull up are our mapping program right at the moment. We didn't have it on the computer. Sorry about that, but where orbiting tuna, fifty miles above the earth, and it looks like we. Are a beam of Baja, California, just a little bit out into the Pacific ocean. So over America, the? U s that mexican border right, our were just an over the Pacific Ocean would just pass California.

Himself. If you indulge me firm- and I want to talk a little bit about feelings knowing I was going to be talking to you. I have been thinking about this moment back on earth and wondering with so much turmoil here and you looking down on all of it from such a distance? What that feels like to look down on a planet? That's truly in them. Of some really challenging tumultuous times, but it certainly is challenging to hear either by second hand or when we get the opportunity

see some bad news up here. All the turmoil. That's going on the challenges with a pandemic in the strife in the cities in and all the different challenges that people are going through on a day to day basis its it is you know emotionally, it does take a toll on us, certainly- and I think the other thing that that really resonates with me personally is just when you look out the window. When you see the planet below you don't see borders, you don't see the strife you see this beautiful planet that we need to take care of, and you know hopefully as technology advances and as this commercial space travel gets going.

Where people will get that opportunity, because I think, if you get the chance to look out the window from space and look back on our planet, it will change you. It will change for the better, and you will realise that this is one big world, rather than all these different little countries or cities or factions that we have on the planet, and I say I think it will make it a better place. Well, that's really interest I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that, because in the time since I believe you ve all last been in space. There have been changes honour, Athena, major. I shelves have broken off in Antarctica, huge fires have swept across Australia, California, the great barrier reef has essentially died and when you look down at earth

actually see some of those changes to the earth compared with when you last saw it will. I think one of the things that we see from up here is that the earth is not a stagnant place. It continues to change whether it's it's a fire, whether it's the seasons, whether its different things happening further out. You know we just saw a comet become visible and they are the predawn air so it's definitely out things happening with the earth and the continuous change I have to It is now a need for you to tell me what it means for a comment to become visible in the donnera and what that actually looks like the comment that I'm referring to was. It was really close to the sun, and so it needed to get far enough away from the sun that we could. Actually, you know, look at it and see it's dim little light that was visible and in darkness, but kind of blinded by the sun. If you will, if you look too closely at it in so, if we got to ask

nation at dawn right before the sun came up. That comma became visible during that that short period of time when it was so close to the sun, but the sun was hidden by the earth, was just an awesome site to be able to see and something that we try to capture the fumes. It's that we do have to look out the window. We try to capture those changes, capture the exciting things that we can see to try to show our view, you know with the folks back home, the folks at are still down her than dad just try to give them an appreciation. For you know just how beautiful our planet is end. And how important it is that we do our best to take care of it

but in terms of time, was issued in Asia? That concludes the New York Times. Portion of the event, please stand by for a voice check from Fox NEWS. Thank you all. We appreciate it bill, Hemorrhoid Fox NEWS. How do you hear me back? I bear loud clear welcome its basis That's it for the daily I'm likeable borrow seat.

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