The Professionals Cohort (Indiana)
Micah Pollak still remembers his first tweet about COVID-19 data in Indiana from March 22.
Indiana launched a poorly-formatted red-dot map, with one red dot for every county that had reported cases with no other information, as the only initial public resource for the public.
"I was looking back at some of my earliest Tweets on Covid and one was something like 'I couldn't find the graph I wanted so I made it myself,' and I think that captures why a lot of us got into this in the first place," Micah said.
What the state was putting out wasn't enough.
Micah found the data presentation inadequate, sometimes misleading, and not answering urgent, basic questions. So he started exploring data on his own and then shared his analysis on Twitter, not expecting it to pick up the popularity or following he now has.
Micah is an associate professor of economics and the Director of the Center for Economic Education & Research (CEER) at Indiana Univ…
