You may not have realised, but you have probably come across work several times over the past year. Her charts have been brandished by everyone from former US president Donald Trump to immunologist Anthony Fauci. As head of research at , an organisation that uses data to make progress against the biggest global problems, she played a central role in setting up the . The resource has proved hugely influential, drawing in more than 100 million users since the pandemic began, and reaching countless more people via media coverage relying on its ability to turn Byzantine government data into elegant graphs of cases, deaths, vaccination rates and more.
In the first of a new series of pandemic profiles, 91av caught up with Ritchie to find out what it is like to witness a global pandemic through data and what the trends suggest the virus has in store for us next.
How did you start covering the pandemic?
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Our scope is the world’s largest problems. At the time [March 2020], we were trying to figure out: does covid qualify? We thought it could be big. What we try to fight against is everyone inundated with daily news – we try to get across long-term trends. Our graphing tool only handled annual data, not daily data, so it involved a massive shift in how we work.
What were some of the early challenges?
Just getting the data into a reasonable format. In March [2020], the World Health Organization was putting out PDF tables of covid cases. I was sitting at midnight copying out data for the graphing tool. It’s almost impossible to get some countries to give a basic data file in a reasonable format. With some countries, we are taking numbers from image files posted on the ministry of health’s Facebook account. The is now probably one of the best. Initially, it was horrendous.
Another big interest for us was getting the messaging right about what people should be taking from the data. One major issue was that a lot of news organisations were reporting the number of cases or deaths on a single day. I think part of the reason the UK acted so late was because people were saying “there’s 100 cases today”, which looks tiny. But that’s not how viruses work. You need to look at the trend. It’s about the change over time rather than the absolute number on any given day. People really weren’t getting that.
What have been some of the most striking trends you have seen in the global data?
I think the biggest one is that rich countries have been massively complacent about how well they’d react to a pandemic. We’ve been really caught out. As a result, we ended up with devastating death tolls. Most people would have expected a massive gap in deaths between low and high-income countries, and in fact it’s almost been the flip, where low-income countries have done well and high-income countries poorly.
Are there any questions that the data hasn’t been able to answer?
We still don’t have a good grasp on the timing of outbreaks geographically. Some of them, such as in India, just don’t make sense. And it doesn’t really make sense how they go away. Then there’s outbreaks in Latin America, where some countries haven’t really had waves – they’ve just had this very persistent, high level of infection and deaths.
The World Health Organization and Johns Hopkins University have put the global death toll at 3.4 million, while some newspapers have estimated 10.2 million. Where does the truth lie?
[The lower figures] are confirmed deaths. It’s hard to put a definitive figure on [the real number]. Looking at excess deaths across the world, I would probably put it around the 10 million mark.
How do you cope personally, working with huge numbers like that, but knowing each one represents an individual?
It’s hard. You have to separate yourself from how sobering it is, but at the same time not lose your humanity, because every data point you put up there is a life, someone’s family. If you stayed too close to it, it would just be overwhelming.
How well do you think politicians have used data during the pandemic?
A lot of politicians have [cherry-picked] their moments to share the data that makes them look good. You can nearly always pick a snapshot where a country looks like it’s doing okay, either by comparing it to countries that are doing really badly, or picking a specific magical moment in time. The obvious example is, at the same time we had Donald Trump using our stuff and holding it up in interviews, Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci were all doing the same. This is part of the reason why we try to make all of the metrics available on the full time period and in an interactive format.
Have you had to combat misleading uses of your data?
We see it quite a lot. One of the stresses for us is not only keeping the data up to date, but trying to keep tabs on who’s using it and how. We’re very conscious of how we present the vaccination data because we’ve seen a number of examples where people have tried to compare vaccinations administered with cases or deaths in a given country. We’ve had people jumping to the conclusion that vaccinations are causing deaths from covid. This stuff goes really, really far and is really dangerous to public trust in vaccinations.
What has jumped out from the data on vaccinations?
Bhutan was just crazy. [In just 16 days, Bhutan vaccinated 93 per cent of its adult population]. Every time I see , I think “oh no, that’s an error”.
What might happen next globally?
I think the situation is looking good for Europe and North America, with high vaccination rates. I expect deaths to be relatively low. The only caveat to that is the potential curveball of a variant. Globally, based on the current rate of vaccinations across the world, . There, I think we’re just going to see these repeated waves and outbreaks.
What data are we still missing?
An accurate infection rate and death count. Those are the two big missing pieces to fully understand the pandemic. I think we will just never know, ultimately, what the true infection rate was.
Finally, how have you coped with the weight of responsibility, as a go-to source of data for a global crisis?
From a mental health point of view, being able to share the data clearly has helped me, making me think I’m helping the situation in some way. I would have struggled if I was sitting feeling helpless about what we could do. But I would be lying if I said it wasn’t incredibly stressful. If we get it wrong, everyone’s getting it wrong.
