The COVID Tracking Project is (nearly) gone. Can we see clearly now?

One evening in early March of last year, Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, colleagues at The Atlantic, set out to answer a simple question: how many people had been tested for the coronavirus in the US so far? The answer, it turned out, was actually quite complicated: in the absence of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it was hard to tell whether low reported case rates to that point reflected low incidence or low testing. Madrigal and Meyer sent a form email to...