Alexis Madrigal, Robinson Meyer, Erin Kissane, and Jeff Hammerbacher, the Pandemic Number Crunchers

Madrigal and Meyer, staff writers at the Atlantic, started the project after they broke news in early March that the U.S. was vastly overrepresenting the number of people who had been tested for Covid-19. They put out a call for volunteers, and Kissane, now the CTP’s managing editor, was the first to sign on. Hammerbacher, a venture capitalist and data scientist, was Madrigal’s college roommate.

The question they wanted to answer: How many Americans were getting tested for Covid-19? As the coronavirus spread, that seemed like one for the federal government, but it didn’t have the infrastructure in place to produce a reliable answer. So the co-founders began compiling a spreadsheet that became the backbone of something more comprehensive: a full-scale public-health reporting initiative that’s now run by 300 volunteers and a core group of paid staff supported by grants.