Covid-tracking geeks convince French people to trust the numbers
When a 25-year-old computer wizz devised a website last year to help French people understand Covid-19 data, he scarcely imagined it would end up getting 10 million visits a month. A team of other volunteer young geeks is now involved. Their mission is to make data speak to ordinary people, and in the process they have won the public’s trust.
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When France first went into lockdown, Guillaume Rozier set up the online Covidtracker platform, which crunches dry Covid data on infection rates, jabs, hospitalisations and deaths, and transforms it into colourful, easy-to-read graphs, charts and maps.
In March 2021 the site registered 10 million unique visitors; not bad, out of a population of 67 million.
Elias Orphelin, 22, joined Rozier’s adventure in March last year after they met online.
“I’m not an epidemiologist, I’m a marketing analyst,” he told RFI. “But when France got locked down I wanted to find a way to help my country.”
Orphelin did not have the skills to heal people in hospitals but he did have the big data tools to help people understand more about how the pandemic was affecting them.
He is now part of an army of over 40 volunteers working evenings and weekends to put government data online in visually, easy-to-read ways: “to make data speak to people”.
Listen to an interview with Elias Orphelin in the Spotlight on France podcast:
Covidtracker’s little sisters
When France began its inoculation campaign in January 2021, Rozier rolled out Vaccintracker to track its progress. In April he launched ViteMaDose to make it easier to find vaccine appointments by aggregating a number of reservation platforms.
On Wednesday, the new baby, Chronodose, went live. It finds unfilled vaccination appointments, and comes just a week after President Emmanuel Macron announced vaccinations would be opened to adults regardless of age or health condition, to make sure no doses are wasted.
Outdoing the government?
Covidtracker and ViteMaDose have earned praise from Macron, and on Monday Francois Jolivet, a lawmaker in the president's centrist party, urged health minister Olivier Veran to present Rozier with the Legion of Honour, France’s highest distinction.
“What’s interesting is that in the beginning ViteMaDose was only an app that we worked on alone. Today we work with different platforms where you can book a jab appointment,” Orphelin explains. “The government reached out to us and said: ‘OK, you’ve made something better than we can, so how can we help and how can we use it to speed up our vaccination campaign’?”
Being courted by government officials could be gratifying, but the team stresses the limits to what it can, and should, do.
“We are only citizens keen on statistics,” says Orphelin.“We can collect, share and visualise the data, but we’re fixing limits to what we can and cannot do.”
While they interpret the data, they do not offer advice or comment on government policy.
“We want to be legitimate in what we do and not to go beyond the boundaries.”
The push to “open” data
Open data laws in France mean the government is legally obliged to make health data public, but the Covidtrackers found the data wasn’t always forthcoming.
“In January there was no way of knowing how many people were being vaccinated in France. We had the same problem with data about Covid in waste water and about how variants were circulating,” says Orphelin.
So sometimes they had to put on the pressure.
When Rozier struggled to get data on the vaccination roll-out he threatened to close down the popular Vaccintracker site. The data was quickly made available.
Hier, j'ai officiellement demandé à @Sante_Gouv la publication précise, régulière et réutilisable des informations relatives à la circulation des variants sur le territoire 🇫🇷
— Elias Orphelin (@eorphelin) February 23, 2021
Je vous explique pourquoi ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/Z0LN7gVUU9
In February Orphelin made an official request for health officials to release data on how Covid-19 variants were circulating nationwide. He used the required procedure and gave it an extra boost by making the request public on Twitter (see tweet above).
“Every time we asked, they did it,” he says.
Gaining trust
The success of Covidtracker and ViteMaDose comes not just because people want easy-to-digest data. Orphelin says the fact that the platform receives no public funding, are not affiliated with the government, and have no ads, means they inspire more trust.
“If Covidtracker was made by the government or if it was sponsored by big pharma, I don’t think citizens would use it so much,” he explains.
“The fact we’re independent is very important for people because they know we’re not doing it for money or political purposes. They gain trust in what we do.”
In a country like France, with a history of vaccine scepticism, the issue of transparency and trust in public institutions is crucial.
The team all work for free and have no plans to change that, although Rozier recently opened the site up to donations should people want to show their appreciation.
In the meantime, Orphelin and Rozier are set to have the pick of their careers.
This story first appeared in the Spotlight on France podcast. Listen here.
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