The Deeper Dig is a weekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Vermonters following the Covid-19 pandemic have likely seen the work of Benjy Renton — even if they don’t know him by name.
Renton aggregates Covid news and research in a weekly newsletter and on his Twitter account, where more than 14,000 people read his posts. He’s also compiled unique data sets on events like the White House Covid outbreak last fall, or the opening weeks of the U.S. vaccine rollout — things that no one else was comprehensively tracking at the time.
Renton’s analyses have made their way into national news coverage, and he’s contributed data work to Gov. Phil Scott’s regular press briefings as an intern for the state’s Department of Financial Regulation.
“It’s been quite nuts,” Renton said of the pace of information he’s kept up with during the pandemic.
His Covid work has also obscured the fact that Renton is just completing his undergraduate studies at Middlebury College. The pandemic started when he was a junior studying abroad in Beijing. He made it back to the U.S. in February of last year, just as international travel restrictions were taking effect.
Renton’s early accounts of the outbreak in China, sourced from global media and his own personal experiences, immediately drew praise.
“I remember lots of people saying, ‘I cannot believe that this is an undergraduate student who’s putting together this newsletter.’ It was such an incredible synthesis of material,” said Jason Mittell, the faculty adviser for the Middlebury Campus newspaper, where Renton worked throughout college.
Since then, Renton’s independent research has led to job opportunities. He started working with the state last winter, when Michael Pieciak, who leads the state’s Covid data modeling, noticed Renton’s work on Twitter.
“He’s, like, the nicest person in Vermont,” Pieciak said. “But also, you can tell he clearly cares about the place where he lives, Vermont, and that we have the best possible response that we can.”
In addition to the state, Renton works with Ariadne Labs, a health care organization that’s supporting his next project: Renton will depart this week on a 17-state road trip to see up close how the vaccination rollout is working throughout the central and eastern United States.
“I’m just excited to also celebrate the point that we’ve gotten to,” Renton said, “this moment that people can travel and people can do that kind of stuff, as someone who hasn’t really moved much in the last year and a half.”
On this week’s podcast, Renton reflects on a year and a half of tracking the pandemic. Below is a partial transcript, edited for length and clarity.
You posted a tweet a few weeks ago that jumped out to me because it was different from what you’re usually tweeting — it was the cover of your thesis. And it was just this weird reminder that you are an undergrad in college. That’s been easy to forget over the course of the past year, when you’ve also carved out this niche as this really visible and reliable source of Covid-19 information. How have you been balancing those two things?
It’s been a really challenging year to balance everything like that. I’m still taking three classes, and I’ve been working on this thesis project for the past year or so. I started in the fall, worked a little bit in January and I’ve been finishing it in the spring. It’s just really interesting because I came into this pandemic not having any formal training or any formal coursework, even, in public health, or really anything of the sciences. I only walk into the science building a number of times a semester here on campus, as an East Asian Studies major.
I felt like I came to this pandemic with a background that I thought was worthwhile — being in China, and just really understanding what was happening in the early days of this.
For a lot of people, they had their moment in March when the world was basically ending — the NBA had suspended their season, Tom Hanks tested positive. That all happened within a period of, like, three hours or whatever, and everyone sort of freaked out. For me, that was much earlier, and being in China in January gave me this perspective that I’ve carried with me over the last year and a half.
What was that moment for you? What was your Tom Hanks/NBA moment when you were overseas?
I think it was around the end of January, probably the 27th or 28th. We had canceled our program on the 28th. I just saw that it was getting harder and harder to do the normal things that we would do abroad, whether it was traveling, or even leaving the campus, because they set up a gate around our college campus. The world started closing in on us in a way.
I was traveling at that time. There were trains that were being canceled, and we took the last one out of the station. People started buying masks — there wasn’t a mask order yet, really, but people just started buying them. I went to the supermarket and I bought the last one off the shelf. And I was basically like, I’m never gonna need this, but like everyone else is buying them. So I should probably, you know, buy one myself. I started having to use it all the time.
For me, that all happened in January. The group that I was with of students sort of freaking out that we’re going to have to go home. Spending the days getting everything I need to get done in Beijing trying to help people get out. And then at night, either helping out with departures, or writing what was happening on the ground, writing daily updates. There were times at the end of January where I slept three to four hours a night for a couple of days, for sure.
What unique perspective do you feel like that gave you on what came next?
I think if people said, “Did you predict a pandemic of this sort?” I didn’t have the knowledge or the expertise to really do that. I didn’t really think that was going to happen.
I think it was going to spread. I grew up in Hong Kong. And when I had moved there in ’05, there was a bird flu pandemic. Right before then there was also SARS, which was like ’03-ish, but I think even like moving there in ’05, that was still on people’s minds. I sort of remembered that these things happen every once in a while. And I think it just gave me the perspective.
February, I think, was a very strange month, because I came back to the U.S., and I did everything normally. Because we didn’t know better. I went to events, I had done all that stuff. But I think for me, it’s had this longevity to it, that I was able to learn from what happened over there. And I wish that people paid more attention in that way to what was happening — not just in China, but in Italy, in Europe and a lot of those places. Because I think we only started to realize that was a problem when it came to our shores and when we started to take action against it.
I wonder why you chose the methods that you did to start tracking things and sharing information. You were really active with a newsletter, with a blog, with your Twitter account, starting all these data dashboards. Why did you see that as a specific need?
I wanted to be able to tell these stories. I think the early days in January, I started pouring out daily reports of what I was reading in the Chinese media, what I was reading the U.S. media, and what was physically happening to us. We couldn’t go on transit, you know; they had to temperature-check us when we were on the subway.
I’m from New York, so I was right outside the city in March and April. Being in New York, and having that sort of experience of what was happening there, I just wanted a way to distill, I think, for myself, and then for a larger audience, what exactly was happening. Because I think, unfortunately, there’s so much that goes on in any given day here, or just in general, with the pandemic. Just being able to distill information in a way that people want to read every week.
And then a lot of the data and the numbers — the numbers didn’t lie, in my opinion. The numbers were just a way to show people what the situation was. I didn’t have any data journalism experience or background before. I had probably made a couple of charts beforehand, but I never had, you know, data experience. And so I basically tried to take those skills and really carry them through. And now it was more of a routine in the last couple of months.
You talk about having this newsletter as sort of a happy medium. But for folks who follow you on Twitter, it’s obvious that you are on all the time, that you’re consuming a ton of news and information, and scientific research and real data about Covid. How have you been able to keep up that pace of consuming, and digesting, and aggregating information over the course of this time?
To be honest, it’s been quite nuts. The way the newsletter works — I started it last April. And every week, I just have to keep going with it. Because even when the newsletter would come out on Sunday, I would be already preparing for the next one, because there would be more stories that I would come across. I have a note in my computer, in the Notes app, that I just keep adding links to all week. And eventually, that gets to be like 20 pages. There was a time, in the height during the summer, where each week it would have about 500 links to it. I read 500 — whether it was news articles, or tweets whatever — I was reading 500 things a week. Now I’ve somewhat cut it down.
I really try to get a balanced perspective. And I think in a world that is incredibly polarized — especially in science, on political lines — for me, I think it’s really important to understand how other people are thinking. I thought about this a lot in the vaccination rollout. When you’re trying to get more people to be vaccinated, the people who are not vaccinated right now are not the ones who care about R-naught or epidemiology — they don’t read anything about that. And so how do you get people to care?
I think you need to look at the everyday issues that affect Americans, or whoever you’re talking to. I think there’s just been a big messaging crisis and crisis of trust: Who do you trust? And for me, I tried to sort of fill that role by really including all those perspectives, as many perspectives as I could.
You make it sound as though you took on this work in this way where you sort of fell into it. But it’s also clear that, the way you’ve stuck with it, Covid-19 really seems to have a kind of draw for you. Have you thought about what it is about Covid-19 that’s provided this fascination?
I think there are just so many angles to the story of how people cover Covid-19. And I’ve tried to read both the medical, the scientific, but then also, to be honest, the downright strange. Like, the toilet paper rush — that never happened in China. People were never hoarding toilet paper to the extent that people were here.
I think for me, it’s just been this really interesting learning experience. Whether it’s dashboards, or data, or anything, you’re creating different things that never existed. Especially now, I feel like it’s been very much like a cat-and-mouse game: that you can create this dashboard for the data set, but then the data breaks, or something else happens that you need to sort of rebuild your plane as you’re flying it. And that’s been the dynamic nature of it, I think, has been really interesting to me, to be able to see just rapid development of everything.
When the vaccination rollout started, CDC didn’t publish public data on vaccinations until either end of December or early January. And we had been vaccinating for two weeks before that. So one of my things was, I was pulling from state dashboards manually. I would spend 30 minutes a night going to 20 states who had dashboards at the time, because no one really did. And we were pulling, basically, how many people were getting vaccinated a day. It was just really interesting to me to build those tools, and to use those tools, that would probably become irrelevant in a week. And then you would have to sort of retool and regroup.
I think it’s also people’s attention, and getting people to focus on particular things. We all have quite short attention spans. And so how do you make people care? You really have to keep innovating. You have to keep making that product that people are going to check.
The White House outbreak is probably one of the bigger things that I was working on. That was absolute craziness for a two-week period, and then afterwards, no one really cared about it. It’s just been really interesting to see how things constantly develop, on an even daily basis.
Did you find it strange at any point that the work of pulling that data together fell to you — to a college senior in the corner of Vermont?
Yeah, I did. And I think there’s been a lot of examples of that, where there have been incomplete data and other people have had to fill the gaps. I think in the earlier days, in the previous administration, there was just a lack of transparency when it came to the data. And I think even now, there still are some gaps.
The White House project basically started on a Post-It note in this room, where I was personally just interested in seeing who the former president had come in contact with. And then it turned into, like, a PowerPoint slide. And then I partnered with a couple of people who could build something that was more durable and could be added to constantly. But it basically just started on a little note card that I had on my desk.
Was it because you had a vision that people are going to want this information, that people are interested in this? Or was it really just fueling your own personal curiosity?
I think it was fulfilling my own personal curiosity going into it. I thought people were going to kind of find it fun or like it, but I didn’t project that it was going to get the traction or anything that it had done.
You’re graduating this weekend, you’re moving out. What happens next?
I’m going on a road trip for 22 days, which starts next Thursday. I think there’s a couple of purposes. One is personal, in that I never really had the opportunity to travel this country, and I really want to explore. I’ve never been to Chicago, or Detroit, or a lot of the places that people in this country may vacation to or whatever. And I think the second part is I really wanted to see a number of people who I’ve worked with online over the last year or so.
But I also want to see, what is it like to be in the U.S. of June of 2021? And what does recovery mean? What does vaccination mean in different places? Because I think it’s really interesting.
I think one of the things that’s perplexed me over the last year is just the sheer regional differences in this country: the Northeast versus the South versus the West. And so I’ll be hitting 17 states, I believe, about 23 cities. Hopefully trying to meet with people, connections with a couple of public health people, and trying to document it as best I can.
I’m just excited to also celebrate the point that we’ve gotten to — this moment that people can travel and people can do that kind of stuff, as someone who hasn’t really moved much in the last year and a half.
How would you characterize that point that we’re at right now? Is the pandemic over? Are we just kind of entering a new phase of it? Where are we?
I think one of the major points of change was a couple weeks ago, when the CDC had changed that masking guidance for vaccinated individuals. It happened to be the day that I was fully vaccinated, so it was really fun to see that. But I think that day when the CDC changed its guidance was a big moment for people, many who were already fully vaccinated, that they can do a lot of the normal things that they were doing before the pandemic.
A lot of people obviously have been doing that already. Some of them have been doing it all along, of course. But I think for a lot of us, especially here in the Northeast, that’s been a major point. How I think about it going forward is that this should be our way to reconnect with people away, to see friends, see family, and to do all those activities that we really enjoyed.
But I think there are two things that we can’t move on from, or not that quickly. I think the first thing is that there were a lot of people who didn’t get to make it to this point because they’re either sick or they lost their lives in the last year and a half. And it’s really hard for me to sort of move on from that. It’s really hard to say, “Well, you know, we’re fine. We’re out doing this stuff.” There are a lot of people who have lost family members, who have lost friends. And it’s really hard in that way.
I think the second thing to consider is that we’re in a crisis of global vaccine equity. We could consider the pandemic possibly over here in the U.S. — and I think these vaccines are obviously incredibly safe, incredibly effective, and I think June is going to be great, July is going to be great, statistics-wise. But a lot of countries will not get vaccines for the next two, three years. And it’s not just strictly a developing versus non-developing country issue. There are a lot of other countries — I was talking to a couple of friends in Australia, New Zealand, and many of them have not had the chance to get vaccinated. Even Canadians, some of them haven’t had the chance to get vaccinated until the last week or so. I hope that we still consider that we are privileged to be in this position. But there are a lot of people around the world that aren’t.
I know, in the time that you’ve been researching and doing work around this, that we’ve learned a lot about this specific virus. I wonder what else you’ve learned — if you feel like there are broader takeaways that you’re coming out of this crisis with.
I think there’s a couple. Number one, pandemics, or really any kind of crisis like this — they’re very interdisciplinary. And as an interdisciplinary major — I’m an international global studies major focusing on East Asia — I’ve gotten to take courses from all kinds of different disciplines. I think it really underscores the point of bringing multiple perspectives together. Yes, there are scientists, there are doctors — obviously, that’s their focus. But then you also need the sociologists, you also need the experts, you need public-private partnerships, you need the government to be on board, you need all that kind of stuff.
The second thing that I was thinking about is: Communication is really, really everything, and incredibly important. How do you get people to care? That’s really been something that I’ve focused on. Even before the pandemic, in journalism, obviously, when you’re writing a story, or you’re doing a piece or whatever, you’re always thinking, “How do I get people to care about what I’m writing about? How do I get people to care about this story?” And that’s been something that I’ve just continuously thought about: How do you get people to really understand the stakes, or understand their personal threat or their risk? And I think the scientific communicators, the people who can communicate that information, have really been the whole stars and the whole heroes throughout this thing. Because it’s been really hard to show people how this is affecting them. And especially in this society, which is very divided, and people have vastly different beliefs.
Do you see yourself coming back to Vermont?
Yeah, I do in the future. I don’t know if that’s gonna be immediately, in the next couple of years, but I definitely would definitely come back and visit. It’s been really rewarding to be here for four years, for sure.
