Richard Coffin: ©USAFacts
When USAFacts recently published updated measles case data, we received an outpouring of public interest—and one repeated question: Why can’t we see the number of measles cases in every state and county?
Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, and with that milestone came an unintended consequence— tracking and presenting this information publicly in a centralized yet local view has not been a priority of our public health system. While this made sense when cases waned, today, as cases surge, we are left with a patchwork of reporting standards, delayed updates, and blind spots.
This is not the first time Americans have found themselves questioning what is happening locally during public health crises. At the onset of COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control did not have an effective way to collect and present case data from states. Instead, for the first several months of the pandemic, they relied on the data we collected and visualizations we produced at USAFacts to fill in gaps and help Americans understand what was happening in their communities. This data was of extreme national interest—traffic to our website grew from 1.5 million visitors a year to 28 million with the COVID-19 pages bringing in the vast majority of our visitors. The demand was clear: people don’t just want health data—they need it, especially when it is local.
We are now in a similar moment. The high-level overview of measles cases available from the CDC is insufficient for the American citizen who might be fearful from reading the news and wants to see what is happening where they live. For a dangerous disease like measles—particularly to young children and immunocompromised individuals—this should concern everyone from parents to policymakers to public health officials.
We know how to do better. During the pandemic, states learned how to mobilize and collect, clean, and share health data with the public. At first, without national standards, they were inconsistent in how they reported, what they presented to the public, and how frequently they updated. Eventually, every state and the CDC produced robust tracking dashboards, but those systems weren’t built to last. As the emergency waned, so too did the urgency for thorough, transparent data reporting.
We understand the difficulty—collecting national data is hard when we have over 90,000 state and local governments in the United States. But COVID taught us the lesson of how important it is that critical data can be quickly collected, standardized, and presented—a lesson we seemed to quickly forget as evidenced by our current measles tracking resources. The federal government, and in this case the CDC, should present this data to the public and create standards for state reporting to help them in this endeavor.
The measles surge is not just a wake-up call —it’s a reminder about the fragility of our health data systems. Knowing where and how an infectious disease is spreading is necessary to respond effectively. And the public deserves to easily know what risks exist in their own communities.
Richard Coffin is Chief of Research and Advocacy at USAFacts, Steve Ballmer’s not-for-profit, nonpartisan civic initiative aimed at empowering Americans with facts by making government data more accessible, understandable, and useable. He joined the organization as its first employee in 2015 and guided it through its initial research and ideation phase, oversaw its launch, and steered its product vision as the organization expanded and evolved. In his role leading research and advocacy, Richard and his team oversee the organization’s research efforts including its publications, standards of analysis, and subject matter expertise.