Commentary: The broken US data systems that struggled during the pandemic can be fixed

COVID-19 has made us all armchair epidemiologists.

We have all been tracking case counts in our communities, deciphering the curves of hospitalizations and deaths on graphs and gauging what we each can do to reduce risks. The data we use are the same critical bits of information our government needs to make policy decisions about masks, vaccines, resource allocation and supplies.

For a year into the pandemic, our nation relied on academic, media and other volunteers to collect and report data on testing and cases, rather than on our nation’s