COVID-19

A note from the COVID-19 Data Hero Awards program organizer

| Rebekah Jones

Grateful.

The time I’ve spent processing nominations, interviewing nominees, writing their profiles, and working with our panel to select winners of our Inaugural COVID-19 Data Hero Awards left me truly grateful.

With the wealth of resources across the United States and Canada, from a college student tracking cases in the White House to a pediatrician developing and communicating vaccines, I can imagine no greater range of talents than those we showcase in this program.

When I made the decision to start this program in January 2021, I envisioned it as a way to build a map or master directory of sorts so that the public and other experts could learn from those who have made data communication central to their efforts during COVID-19.

While I have spoken to a handful of the people on this list in the past, and have heard of a few dozen more, even I did not appreciate how hard people from all backgrounds and levels of expertise, with limited resources or minimal notoriety, were conquering the virus in their communities through effective communication of data and science. 

As the awards portion of our program closes, our directory will continue to grow, so please nominate whoever has been a data hero for you during this pandemic for recognition on our site.

The purpose of this program has always been recognition, not competition. The awards allow us to highlight 26 exceptional data communicators and advocates, but that in no way means that every other person submitted is not equally deserving of praise.

Some of those who we considered as finalists graciously bowed out, wanting to remain in the program but yielding the spotlight to those who have been under cloudier skies. 

And while we received nominations for brave heroes like Dr. Cleavon Gilman, who lost his job for simply telling the public that Arizona had no staffed ICU beds, and devoted volunteers like those behind the vaccine-alerts.com project in Oklahoma, we tried to maintain our focus in consideration of the final awards — those who made data, data-driven analysis and science the center of their public communications.

We broke up our list of nominees into five categories. Within each group you’ll find a range of expertise, experience and personalities. We wanted our finalists to represent their peers, while acknowledging the handful who stood out among them.

In the end, the decision to select just one hero per group to recognize as a “winner” became too difficult. So for each cohort of heroes, we decided to recognize a winner, a runner-up, and all other nominees with a reward for their efforts. We also want to reward those who won the public vote through online voting, which more than 35,000 unique IP addresses cast ballots for.

Online Voting Winners:

The Newcomers – Rachel Woodul (North Carolina)
The Press – Mary Landers (Georgia)
The Professionals – Matthew Holloway (Missouri)
The Specialists – Dr. Emily Smith (Texas)
The Provocateurs – Ryan Imgrund (Ontario, Canada)

We also decided to honor three data hero nominees who have spent the last year working on COVID-19 in public service or as volunteers. 

After all awards are given, our program will give $10,000 in awards to our finalists – far beyond our original budget of $3,000, but worth every penny.

I have discovered so many amazing new people through this program, and I hope you will, too.

Congratulations to all of our nominees, finalists and winners. The community of resources built during COVID-19 should be widely recognized and celebrated for the efforts they put into this unprecedented time. 

Thank you,

Rebekah Jones

Note: All award recipients will be announced at 5:00 PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, March 31, 2021, here on our website and on Twitter.

Ensheng Dong

| Rebekah Jones

The Newcomers Cohort (Maryland)

The Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 dashboard did more to educate Americans about global health and geography than any single resource in modern history.

Ensheng Dong (Maryland)

No doubt – the student behind it changed the world.

Early in the pandemic, references to the “team” behind the project misguidedly believed an office of experts originated the project, as the workload and unique skills needed to take on such a task seemed impossible for one person, much less one student.

Unknown to most of the world was that Ensheng started the project on his own, with help from his academic advisor, Lauren Gardner.

A few words from those who nominated Ensheng:

“Ensheng Dong is the brain behind the Johns Hopkins University dashboard that put the virus in the global and geographical spotlight. He was a grad student and wanted to provide data about the virus because his family lived in Taiyuan. Without this work, who knows if we would have ever seen the virus the way we do now.””The best epidemiology model to track the COVID epidemic with the statistical tests.”

Click here to visit the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 site.

Josh and Amanda Smith

| Rebekah Jones

The Volunteers Cohort (Texas)

We are working to complete our profiles for the more than 500 nominees submitted during the month of February. If you’d like to add to this profile, please email us at: Contact@Data-Usa.org

“My wife and I are veterans of the concert industry. So when covid hit, our entire world came to a halt a couple weeks before the US lockdowns started. We knew we were going to need a centralized place to stay in touch with our community, so on 3/17/20, we launched DFW Corona Connection.“

“What we didn’t know was that this group would quickly became a vital resource for nearly 22,000 of our neighbors. We fact checked everything. We took it upon ourselves to share everything from daily press conferences to daily case counts to daily updates from our local animal shelters. People turned to DFWCC for just about everything. Unemployment claim not going through? We had tips to bypass the clogged up website and phone lines. Need toilet paper? You can swap supplies here. BLM Protests? We followed them all in real-time. Election? Yeah, we did some of that too. Almost accidentally, we had created an online community that mimicked the “real world.” It’s still going strong today and we plan on keeping it going even after COVID-19 is no longer the daily headline.”

A few words from those who submitted Josh and Amanda Smith:

“At the onset of the pandemic, husband / wife team Josh & Amanda Smith created an online space exclusive to the Dallas / Fort Worth community called DFW Corona Connection. They have invested countless hours rooting out misinformation, offering resources and connecting the dots between the crises we have faced while providing localized & accurate daily data throughout the last year. The group has grown to over 21,000 members of information seekers, elected officials, journalists, community leaders, small business owners, etc. The group members have come to rely on Josh & Amanda not only for accurate information, but to provide a safe space for the North Texas community to digitally connect with their neighbors. Their efforts were recently recognized in an article from the Dallas Observer: “

Click here to visit Josh and Amanda’s DFW Corona Connection Facebook page.

Jason Salemi

| Rebekah Jones

The Specialists Cohort (Florida)

We are working to complete our profiles for the more than 500 nominees submitted during the month of February. If you’d like to add to this profile, please email us at: Contact@Data-Usa.org

Jason Salemi (Florida)

Dr. Jason Salemi is an Associate Professor with joint appointments in the at the University of South Florida College of Public Health and the Morsani College of Medicine. He also maintains adjunct faculty status at his former institution, Baylor College of Medicine.

“I have a demonstrated record of collaborative research, scholarly publication, teaching and advising, and participation in public health organizations and professional associations” Jason writes on his website.

“I have amassed a substantial and versatile proficiency in database development, data linkage, management, and analysis, program and systems evaluation, community engagement, and information dissemination. I am a passionate public health professional committed to solving problems and creating conditions that enable people to lead healthy, productive lives.”

Jason built a reputation in Florida as an honest, transparent and vigilant reporter of data and trends through his website and Twitter feed. Jason makes all of his data available to the public for free, and has invested countless hours in keeping Florida honest, never deterred by anti-mask, anti-vaccines and pro-government harassment. His commitment to data access, transparency and data visualization may be unmatched in the state of Florida.

Graph depicting the lag in COVID-19 death reporting in Florida on Jason’s COVID-19 tracking site.

A few words from those who nominated Jason:

“Dr. Salemi is consistent, transparent, dependable, creative, and trustworthy.”

“Non partisan data. Responsive to requests. The best in the state. Doing it for nothing but to inform.”

“With all the misinformation out there and cover-ups in our state and by our governor, Florida is lucky to have so many data heroes like Jason and Rebekah out there. They give us the truth when the government won’t!”

Click here to follow Jason on Twitter

Click here to visit Jason’s data site.

Click here to visit Jason’s personal site.

Andy Flach

| Rebekah Jones

The Volunteers Cohort (Arizona)

We are working to complete our profiles for the more than 500 nominees submitted during the month of February. If you’d like to add to this profile, please email us at: Contact@Data-Usa.org

Andy Flach (Arizona)

“I have always loved spreadsheets and tracking data in order to gain insights into complicated phenomena, so when the pandemic started I began transcribing and charting Arizona Department of Health Services Covid-19 data in order to get a better sense of the progression of the pandemic in Arizona, and to keep a record of the data and how it changed over time (the ADHS data dashboard doesn’t have an option to download data). Then I started sharing my charts, and a link to a Google Sheet with the data, on the Tucson Coronavirus Facebook group and on Twitter, figuring as long as I was doing this work for my own curiosity I might as well share it in case anyone else was interested. My overall goal in all this has been to really “see” the pandemic and try and get a sense of how it works.”

Click here to see Andy’s data tracking site

Click here to follow Andy on Twitter

Philip Nelson

| Rebekah Jones

The Newcomers Cohort (South Carolina)

Philip Nelson (South Carolina)

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Philip Nelson has collected data and informed South Carolinians about the virus in their state.

In March 2020, Nelson started a simple spreadsheet to collect daily data, but then quickly realized that he could use his computer science background to automate his work and expand the resources he provided.

Starting off, he didn’t know much about working with data or using code, but over time that changed.

He wrote scripts and learned to use data tools and libraries to help visualize the data, and then he started posting the information to his Twitter.

Over several months he learned how to use programming to pull large amounts of data from SC DHEC, visualize it, and then post it to twitter all within seconds of the data going live.

His work has garnered attention from state legislators. local media, and public health researchers.

“I care about accurately presenting the data in an accessible manner, and I want everyone to have access to data,” Nelson said. “Because DHEC doesn’t accessibly provide downloadable case history for the state and its counties, I provide CSVs and graphs of this data on my website.”

Philip has worked hard and learned many things in order to become a reliable source for South Carolina COVID19 data.

A few words from those who nominated Philip:

“As an investigative reporter his datasets have provided me leads on stories I wasn’t even thinking about, particularly the scale of COVID outbreak in South Carolina prisons. His willingness to push through and find new ways of analyzing data particularly in a rural southern state is unlike anything else I’ve seen.”

“I’m a retired biostatistician. When the pandemic hit, I started tracking SCDHEC data on my own. As soon as I found Philip’s data tracking, I quit doing my own. Philip posts summaries, points out trends, and presents it all in clear graphics, usually within minutes of SCDHEC’s daily data release. He points out inconsistencies in the official data, and does a better job than SCDHEC explaining the quirks in data collection. He does all this on his own time, while a full-time student at Winthrop. He has a knack for digging into data and turning it into user-friendly graphics, and the drive to get through the many technical issues of automating the process. He has a bright future ahead.”

Click here to follow Philip on Twitter

Benjy Renton

| Rebekah Jones

The Newcomers Cohort (Vermont)

Benjy Renton (Vermont)

The White House COVID-19 outbreak tracker became one of the most illustrative data pieces of the failure of the Trump administration in handling the pandemic.

The 21-year-old college senior behind the project started collecting that data out of curiosity on a piece of paper after Donald Trump tested positive last October.

Not long after, Benjy Renton’s other COVID-19 data projects and maps were being shared across the world, informing decision makers and driving national discussions about school reopening and more – work he had been doing throughout the pandemic.

“It snowballed into a much larger project that started initially with the first White House outbreak.. and went into December,” he said.

Benjy tracks cases in universities, too. And he tracks which counties in the United State are (or are not) meeting the CDC’s recently revised metrics for reopening schools safely.

He was in China last January (2020) when news of the outbreak spread across the world. When he returned to the U.S., he was shocked to find how few measures were being taken. His work visualizing COVID-19 data started not long after. From tracking testing to outbreaks in higher education, Benjy worked to get the data out.

Someone said he should be hung during a Reddit “Ask me anything event.” Online harassment comes with COVID-19 communication, no matter how much the source sticks to the data.

“The raw numbers don’t lie,” he said. “You can use the numbers to lie, but the raw numbers don’t lie. It’s important for people to understand exactly what is happening.”

A few words from those who nominated Benjy:

“Benjy has been doing basically everything since the pandemic started, from contact tracing the White House to making accessible visualizations of vaccine rollout to writing a weekly newsletter summarizing all of the relevant new Covid information from that week. I can’t point to any single person and objectively say he saved their life, but I have no doubt that his data work has gotten thousands of people through the pandemic well-informed, well-protected, and maybe even a little less lonely. And he’s been doing all of this on top of a full course load from a NESCAC.”

“Benjy Renton has done a remarkable job at collating information about the pandemic, both nationally and with specific focuses on higher ed, the White House, and Vermo nt. His weekly newsletters have done an incredible job at summarizing the state of higher ed and the country on a weekly basis. His various projects and even his Twitter feed have been fantastic, thorough, and all-encompassing sources of analysis on the pandemic and its effects. His skilled data interpretation and visualizations have been outstanding. He’s perhaps known most widely for his incredible trackers on COVID cases in colleges and the White House, vaccine distribution, and more–some of which he established far before other news sources attempted something similar. The most remarkable element of Benjy Renton’s work is that he’s not a scientist, or a professional journalist, but a college student. His work is driven not by professional obligation but by care and interest, yet it exceeds that of professionals.”

Click here to visit Benjy’s website
Click here to follow Benjy on Twitter

Dr. Theresa Chapple

| Rebekah Jones

The Specialists Cohort (Georgia)

Dr. Theresa Chapel (Georgia)

Dr. Theresa Chapple has dedicated the last 13 months to combating misinformation about COVID-19, building her science communication skills to teach the public about Covid-19 prevention approaches, and advocating for data-driven public policy to address the pandemic.

Since June, she’s worked with 27 school districts across the country to aid in Covid-19 data and research interpretation, setting data related metrics for reopening and closings, and identifying and training on risk mitigation approaches.

She has also utilized platforms such as social media and traditional media to share public health prevention messages and translate research into language understandable by the masses.

Her thought-provoking and thoroughly researched messages on school reopening challenged narratives being pushed by economists who intentionally misled the public about the risks associated with in-person learning during the pandemic.

She breaks the data down, offers analysis and context, and is one of the most responsive experts for COVID-19 information on Twitter.

“There’s a reason Dr. Chapple put this [COVID-19 outbreaks in schools and childcare settings] exhaustingly long list together, and why it’s still growing,” Karen Johnson wrote in Yahoo! News last August. “She wants us to realize and truly understand that this is what happens when people gather in groups. When adults gather in groups. When teens gather in groups. And when children gather in groups. Camps, daycare centers, and how it will be schools.”

A few words from those who nominated Dr. Chapple:

“Dr. Chapple may be the most courageous woman I’ve encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic. She unabashedly challenges misinformation in a confident and assertive way that doesn’t come off as talking down to people.”

“When a lot of junk science about schools came out from people with no subject-matter expertise, Dr. Chapple confronted them with the realities of what the real science and data showed, and by doing so likely saved many lives.”

Click here to follow Dr. Chapple on Twitter.

Jorge Caballero

| Rebekah Jones

The Provocateurs Cohort (California)

As a Stanford University physician with more than a decade of experience working with health data, Dr. Jorge Caballero could easily fit into both the specialists and the professionals groups of our awards program. His work during COVID-19 would indeed make him a finalist in either of those cohorts.

Dr. Jorge Caballero

Dr. Caballero’s advocacy for data access and transparency, and his continued commitment to communicating the racial and ethnic disparities in testing, cases and vaccinations shown in the data, makes him stand out as a Provocateur.

In March 2020, Dr. Caballero cofounded Coders against Covid, a volunteer group that builds tech solutions to address the most pressing needs of those affected by COVID-19, challenging his local, state and federal officials to step up.

Dr. Caballero built the first nation-wide COVID-19 testing site directory in mid-March 2020, before most states even had comprehensive lists of their own testing site facilities.

Shortly thereafter, Coders against Covid joined FEMA’s crowdsourcing initiative, and were connected with GISCorps, a volunteer group of geospatial information specialists. The partnership built the most comprehensive database of COVID-19 testing locations in the country, providing maps and tools to find your nearest testing site, operations hours, appointment scheduling, and more.

Dr. Caballero also uses the power of his position and his Twitter account to share data and information about the state of Coronavirus in California and across the country on a daily basis. He keeps up with data in Arizona and Nevada, even sharing the work of our other COVID-19 Data Hero Award nominees:

When California lifted its curfew and stay-at-home orders in January, Dr. Caballero made sure the public was aware that the data did not support such a move.

“Of course, all that flies out the window when it comes to extended contact that’s unmasked, as one might expect from, say, outdoor dining. It’s exactly that paradox that prompted an angry tweetstorm from Stanford doctor Jorge A. Caballero, who says that “The data does NOT support lifting restrictions— this would be Newsom caving to political pressure, again,” perhaps referring to an anti-vaccination/Republican-led recall effort against the governor. Caballero warns that even now, the devastating surge in Southern California “is moving up the state: through the central valley and into the SF Bay Area.”

San Francisco, Jan. 25, 2021

When California spent $62.5 million on a contract with Verily – a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet – which led Trump to erroneously claim Google was building a site to help Americans find testing locations (a site Dr. Caballero would end up creating), Dr. Caballero stepped up and spoke out.

But the [Verily] partnership has also faced criticism from public health experts from the start, and left some elected officials in California frustrated by what they describe as a misguided approach to testing vulnerable communities.

Dr. Jorge Caballero, a Stanford physician and co-founder of the public testing database Coders against COVID, began warning CDPH contacts in April that poorer areas remained underserved by state testing sites. As he fielded requests in Spanish for help with the platform, it seemed that Verily wasn’t “nimble enough to address the demand and the evolution of the demand,” Caballero said.

“This whole strategy was just sort of backwards from the get-go,” Caballero said. “Why were we spending this money if it wasn’t solving problems, and it was creating additional problems?”

Mercury News, Feb. 25, 2021

Not one to play partisan politics, Dr. Caballero calls out, defends, and makes policy recommendations to all of the science and data-backed decisions made across the country. His advocacy, insight and persistent communications about what the data tells us has impacted communities across the country, saving countless lives in the process.

A few words from those who nominated Dr. Caballero:

“If everyone would have just listened to him from the start, we would all be so much better off. California has made little effort to work with Hispanic communities, to communicate data with us regularly. It’s like we don’t matter. We’re dying and we don’t matter. The only person who seems to care is the doctor.” [Note: This submission was translated from Spanish]

“Jorge’s reputation as a physician, a scientist, as the “Data-driven MD,” could not be over-stated. I’ve never met a man who has worked harder to ensure accurate information reaches the public, that the accurate information is advocated for, and that the activism results in meaningful discussion and, hopefully, policy change. No one else could possibly be more worthy of a Data Hero Award than Jorge Caballero.”

Click here to follow Dr. Jorge Caballero on Twitter.

Click here to visit the Coders Against Covid Twitter page, or click here to see the Coders Against Covid website.