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e/ * and the level I know this sounds odd, but my favorite website is a treasure trove of data that tracks diseases and health problems all over the world. It's called the Global Burden of Disease,* and the level of detail it contains is astonishing. (The 2019 version tracked 286 causes of death and 369 types of diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories.) If you're interested in how long people live, what makes them sick, and how these things change over time, this site is the best source. I can spend hours at a time looking at the data. The site is published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which is located at the University of Washington in my hometown of Seattle (and a Gates Foundation grantee). As you can probably guess from its name, IHME specializes in measuring health around the world. It also does sophisticated computer modeling that attempts to establish cause-and-effect relationships: What factors might explain why cases are going up or down in some country, and what does the forecast look like a few months out?† Since early 2020, I've been peppering the team at IHME with questions about COVID. What I've hoped to find out is what the countries that are dealing most successfully with COVID have in common. What did they all do right? Once we answer that question with some certainty, we'll understand the best practices and be able encourage other countries to adopt them. The first thing you have to do is define success, but that's not as easy as you might think. For example, you can't just look at how often people with COVID in a given country went on to * https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/ † You may have heard about "the Chris Murray Model." That's actually the IHME model. Chris runs IHME and was chagrined to hear the organization's work ascribed only to him.