This is the national data I have been using in my spreadsheet, so I will be sad to see it wind down.

I've always identified with this project since it is similar to my own motivations and experiences. When I first started collecting Covid data, there was basically nothing but a few scattered press releases that sometimes were not even consistent with eachother. It was very difficult to understand if things were getting better/worse/same as well as being very hard to interpret the data we did get. Metrics like testing "positivity rate" were not part of the official record at all - first time I heard about that was on this subreddit when we were trying to figure out how accurate the data was, so I added it to my spreadsheet. A few weeks later we started seeing it in the state press releases.

A year ago seems like an eternity, but when you go back and look at where we were back then, it is amazing how much things have changed! Seeing these kinds of reports for instance was like a pipedream: https://beta.healthdata.gov/Community/COVID-19-State-Profile-Report-Illinois/cmib-5z2c

Anyways, here is there press release - its worth a read.

https://covidtracking.com/analysis-updates/covid-tracking-project-end-march-7

We began the work out of necessity and planned to do it for a couple of weeks at most, always in the expectation that the federal public health establishment would make our work obsolete. Every few months through the course of the project, we asked ourselves whether it was possible to wind down. Instead, we saw the federal government continue to publish patchy and often ill-defined data

It’s hard to understand all the ways that our data—which started with a single spreadsheet—has been used in the world. Two different presidential administrations have cited it in strategic plans, academic and scientific researchers have used it in nearly 800 papers, and it has helped ground media coverage of the pandemic by national, international, and local news outlets. It’s been read into the Congressional record, mentioned in proposed legislation, used repeatedly by lawmakers to demand answers about the pandemic, and cited in numerous federal lawsuits. Amid so much institutional failure, it has been a sustaining force to see regular people all over the country patch this vital data together every day, united in their commitment to their fellow humans.