A trusted Minnesota COVID-19 tracking source is ending

CATHY WURZER: Well, one of the most reliable sources of COVID tracking in Minnesota is coming to an end. David Montgomery started his thorough tracking of COVID numbers as a reporter when he was here at MPR News. He has since left our newsroom, but he kept up his COVID tracking for more than three years. But that tracking has come to an end with the New Year.

David's now a senior data journalist for YouGov America. He joins us to reflect on his COVID project. Good to hear your voice again-- how are you, David?

DAVID MONTGOMERY: I'm doing great, Cathy. Thanks for having me back on.

CATHY WURZER: Absolutely. I was trying to remember-- you know, I don't know about you, but the pandemic years have really screwed up my sense of time. I was trying to remember how you got yourself involved in this project and how it evolved. Do you remember the story?

DAVID MONTGOMERY: Yeah, well I was hired by MPR for a job focused on political data journalism in February, 2020. I picked it over another offer, in part, because I was really excited to get back into an in-person newsroom after several years working remotely. And that all lasted about three weeks until March, 2020 when the biggest story of the year broke and all plans got thrown out the window.

And early on, everything was very improvised. We had a Google spreadsheet that we were trying to track data from the state in. And ultimately, what it came down to was while the state was releasing a lot of data, it was in a very user-unfriendly format. And so there was just a huge opportunity for news organizations like MPR to translate that data into ways that could be more useful for people.

Even just at the basic level of accounting for day of the week effects, sometimes it would look like there's a big increase in data, but when you account for the fact that more people got tested on Mondays, it turned out that the cases were actually going down.

CATHY WURZER: Right, I remember that. You were also really good at explaining trends, if I recall. Who helps you with that, because that's not easy?

DAVID MONTGOMERY: For me, the big thing is just working in public. Being a journalist, you're publishing all the time. And that means you get feedback from readers and listeners in whatever medium you're working in. And that was really helpful. I didn't get everything right. I got some things wrong. I made some mistakes, did some things that were suboptimal.

And I'd always hear from readers in varying degrees of politeness. And it was just a constant process of learning and improving my approach and refining my graphics and finding new ways to understand and communicate what was going on.

CATHY WURZER: What did you learn from tracking something that was pretty unpredictable there for a while?

DAVID MONTGOMERY: I think there's just a certain amount of epistemic humility, for lack of a better word. You've got to be cautious about not thinking you know more then you know. A lot of times COVID data was an incredibly rich data source. There's data coming out every single day in multiple different metrics. But it had shortcomings.

And there were all sorts of ways in which an apparent trend would turn out to not be true or turn out to be way bigger than it first seemed. And ultimately, I just had to learn to be cautious and to identify what appeared to be happening and control for what we could control and know not to assert more than we were able to assert.

CATHY WURZER: I'm wondering, data journalism is something that has always been around in our business obviously. But it's really kind of come to the fore in the past maybe, what, 5-10 years or something like that? How well-suited is data journalism for something like a pandemic? I would argue very well-suited. What do you think?

DAVID MONTGOMERY: It was certainly a good fit for the skills I had accumulated through that point in my career and also the skills that I accumulated while covering COVID on the job. There are lots of things that I was doing by the end that I didn't really know how to do at the start. That initial ad hoc Google spreadsheet eventually was a full code package that was mostly automated and spitting out graphs automatically every day. This was sort of a gradual development.

But we live in a world that's full of data. And a lot of this data can be incomprehensible, can be overwhelming. And there's a real opportunity still for people who know how to work with that data to extract the trends and then how to communicate that to other people who don't necessarily have the time or skills to do that themselves.

CATHY WURZER: So when you look back at what you did here, David, what role did the wastewater, for lack of a better word, the sewage tracking system-- how did that change the game?

DAVID MONTGOMERY: I thought that was very helpful. I mean at the very least, it was another data metric. And because every data metric that we tracked has at its own strengths and weaknesses, you got the fullest picture of what was happening by looking at as many metrics as possible.

Cases give you a sense of what was happening about right now. But they were subject to who went out and got tested and things like that. Hospitalizations were a little more reliable, but there were questions about how that was tracked. And that was a little more slow and delayed.

Deaths were maybe the most reliable. But that data took months to figure out who was dying from COVID. So wastewater gave a very up-to-date, fast, sort of every week metric of what was going on. And it was helpful to check other metrics against this and find out where they aligned and where they didn't align. And it was also a way to sort of look back in time and get a long time series until ultimately the Met Council stopped reporting that data sometime this year.

CATHY WURZER: Right. What was the toughest part of the work?

DAVID MONTGOMERY: I think it was just the grind. That it just kept going. Obviously, all of us are familiar with the fact that this pandemic just kept going for months and then years when we were all ready for it to be over. And there were times when the state was releasing data every day and I was the only one at MPR who was able to update that data.

So there were times when I was out in a camping trip and would drive half an hour into town midday on a Saturday to get an internet connection so I could get the day's COVID data and push out up-to-date charts for the MPR website. Over time, that really got to be a bit of a grind.

CATHY WURZER: Gosh, I hope you were paid extra for that. Probably not, but we bless you for doing that. Bless you for doing that.

I know you're going to kind of put this to rest-- or you did, actually, yesterday. You could have kept going I guess, but why did you decide to put an end to it?

DAVID MONTGOMERY: I had announced I was ending it yesterday. I decided to keep it going for just another couple of weeks only because there's a bit of a data lag. And so I want to make sure that we get all the 2023 data reported. And that'll take a couple of weeks into January for the Health Department to put that out.

But once we get sort of the 2023 data complete, then I'll stop updating it.

CATHY WURZER: OK.

DAVID MONTGOMERY: Ultimately, though, the reason was that-- I mean, I think that public interest in this has gone down. Certainly, there are some people who are very interested in this data still for a variety of reasons-- people who are immunocompromised or otherwise at risk. But the public interest is definitely less than it was a few years ago. And the data has greatly diminished.

We're no longer getting wastewater data from the Met Council. The State Health Department, which was putting out dozens of metrics every day, is now basically just reporting hospitalizations and deaths. And all these levels are much lower than they were during the big spikes back in the pandemic.

And there's never a perfect time. And by now, my process is mostly automated. But it just felt like a good time to set aside this burden of having to continually update this for a increasingly diminished public interest. I do regret that there are some people who were still making heavy use of this and they're going to now lose this data. But it couldn't keep going forever.

CATHY WURZER: Well, you were a steady source of certainty during a time of much uncertainty. And you were just such a rock through this whole thing, David. It was really a pleasure working with you. And thanks for the really great work that you did.

DAVID MONTGOMERY: Well, thank you, Cathy. Thanks to MPR for providing a great place to work and a great venue to help share my research with Minnesota.

CATHY WURZER: Say it before you go, YouGov America. I've never heard of it. What is It?

DAVID MONTGOMERY: We're one of the largest polling firms in the US. We do a lot of both election related polling and more lighthearted polling. We just ran a poll the other day on how many books people had read in 2023, for example.

CATHY WURZER: All right, that sounds like fun. David, I wish you all the best. Thanks much.

DAVID MONTGOMERY: Thanks. Thanks, Cathy.

CATHY WURZER: David Montgomery is a senior data journalist with YouGov America. You can still get COVID numbers by subscribing to MPR's weekly COVID newsletter.