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

06/21/21 • 142 min

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.

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.

We also talk about:

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

Previous Episode

#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all

It can be tough to get people to truly care about reducing existential risks today. But spare a thought for the longtermist of the 17th century: they were surrounded by people who thought extinction was literally impossible.

Today’s guest Tom Moynihan, intellectual historian and author of the book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction, says that until the 18th century, almost everyone — including early atheists — couldn’t imagine that humanity or life could simply disappear because of an act of nature.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

This is largely because of the prevalence of the ‘principle of plenitude’, which Tom defines as saying:

“Whatever can happen will happen. In its stronger form it says whatever can happen will happen reliably and recurrently. And in its strongest form it says that all that can happen is happening right now. And that's the way things will be forever.”

This has the implication that if humanity ever disappeared for some reason, then it would have to reappear. So why would you ever worry about extinction?

Here are 4 more commonly held beliefs from generations past that Tom shares in the interview:

• All regions of matter that can be populated will be populated: In other words, there are aliens on every planet, because it would be a massive waste of real estate if all of them were just inorganic masses, where nothing interesting was going on. This also led to the idea that if you dug deep into the Earth, you’d potentially find thriving societies.
• Aliens were human-like, and shared the same values as us: they would have the same moral beliefs, and the same aesthetic beliefs. The idea that aliens might be very different from us only arrived in the 20th century.
• Fossils were rocks that had gotten a bit too big for their britches and were trying to act like animals: they couldn’t actually move, so becoming an imprint of an animal was the next best thing.
• All future generations were contained in miniature form, Russian-doll style, in the sperm of the first man: preformation was the idea that within the ovule or the sperm of an animal is contained its offspring in miniature form, and the French philosopher Malebranche said, well, if one is contained in the other one, then surely that goes on forever.

And here are another three that weren’t held widely, but were proposed by scholars and taken seriously:

• Life preceded the existence of rocks: Living things, like clams and mollusks, came first, and they extruded the earth.
• No idea can be wrong: Nothing we can say about the world is wrong in a strong sense, because at some point in the future or the past, it has been true.
• Maybe we were living before the Trojan War: Aristotle said that we might actually be living before Troy, because it — like every other event — will repeat at some future date. And he said that actually, the set of possibilities might be so narrow that it might be safer to say that we actually live before Troy.

But Tom tries to be magnanimous when faced with these incredibly misguided worldviews.

In this nearly four-hour long interview, Tom and Rob cover all of these ideas, as well as:

• How we know people really believed such things
• How we moved on from these theories
• How future intellectual historians might view our beliefs today
• The distinction between ‘apocalypse’ and ‘extinction’
• Utopias and dystopias
• Big ideas that haven’t flowed through into all relevant fields yet
• Intellectual history as a possible high-impact career
• And much more

Chapters:

Rob’s intro (00:00:00)
The interview begins (00:01:45)
Principle of Plenitude (00:04:02)
How do we know they really believed this? (00:13:20)
Religious conceptions of time (00:24:01)
How to react to wacky old ideas (00:29:18)
The Copernican revolution (00:36:55)
Fossils (00:42:30)
How we got past these theories (00:51:19)
Intellectual history (01:01:45)
Future historians looking back to today (01:13:11)
Could plenitude actually be true? (01:27:38)
What is vs. what ought to be (01:36:43)
Apocalypse vs. extinction (01:45:56)
The history of probability (02:00:52)
Utopias and dystopias (02:12:11)
How Tom has changed his mind since writing the book (02:28:58)
Are we making progress? (02:35:00)
Big ideas that haven’t flowed through to all relevant fields yet (02:52:07)
Failed predictions (02:59:01)
Intellectual history as high-impact career (03:06:56)
Communicati...

Next Episode

#104 – Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics

When the first person with COVID-19 went to see a doctor in Wuhan, nobody could tell that it wasn’t a familiar disease like the flu — that we were dealing with something new.

How much death and destruction could we have avoided if we'd had a hero who could? That's what the last Assistant Secretary of Defense Andy Weber asked on the show back in March.

Today’s guest Pardis Sabeti is a professor at Harvard, fought Ebola on the ground in Africa during the 2014 outbreak, runs her own lab, co-founded a company that produces next-level testing, and is even the lead singer of a rock band. If anyone is going to be that hero in the next pandemic — it just might be her.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

She is a co-author of the SENTINEL proposal, a practical system for detecting new diseases quickly, using an escalating series of three novel diagnostic techniques.

The first method, called SHERLOCK, uses CRISPR gene editing to detect familiar viruses in a simple, inexpensive filter paper test, using non-invasive samples.

If SHERLOCK draws a blank, we escalate to the second step, CARMEN, an advanced version of SHERLOCK that uses microfluidics and CRISPR to simultaneously detect hundreds of viruses and viral strains. More expensive, but far more comprehensive.

If neither SHERLOCK nor CARMEN detects a known pathogen, it's time to pull out the big gun: metagenomic sequencing. More expensive still, but sequencing all the DNA in a patient sample lets you identify and track every virus — known and unknown — in a sample.

If Pardis and her team succeeds, our future pandemic potential patient zero may:

1. Go to the hospital with flu-like symptoms, and immediately be tested using SHERLOCK — which will come back negative
2. Take the CARMEN test for a much broader range of illnesses — which will also come back negative
3. Their sample will be sent for metagenomic sequencing, which will reveal that they're carrying a new virus we'll have to contend with
4. At all levels, information will be recorded in a cloud-based data system that shares data in real time; the hospital will be alerted and told to quarantine the patient
5. The world will be able to react weeks — or even months — faster, potentially saving millions of lives

It's a wonderful vision, and one humanity is ready to test out. But there are all sorts of practical questions, such as:

• How do you scale these technologies, including to remote and rural areas?
• Will doctors everywhere be able to operate them?
• Who will pay for it?
• How do you maintain the public’s trust and protect against misuse of sequencing data?
• How do you avoid drowning in the data the system produces?

In this conversation Pardis and Rob address all those questions, as well as:

• Pardis’ history with trying to control emerging contagious diseases
• The potential of mRNA vaccines
• Other emerging technologies
• How to best educate people about pandemics
• The pros and cons of gain-of-function research
• Turning mistakes into exercises you can learn from
• Overcoming enormous life challenges
• Why it’s so important to work with people you can laugh with
• And much more

Chapters: